A Namespace About Story Worlds

MacronNotes, Kory, and Amonimus suggested that I make a thread for this idea, so here I am.

After discovering the 🌎Setting/ namespace on All The Tropes and Tropedia and the pretty spiffy 🗺️Map/ namespace on FANDOM, I began wondering; what if we had a namespace about story worlds? My thinking is that it would allow Tropers to create/submit a Fantasy World Map of a work or verse and list tropes for areas as well as maybe catalogue episodes/factions/installments.

This namespace would be useful for:

• Video Games that feature expansive areas for the player to visit. (i.e. Among Us, Banjo-Kazooie, and many The Legend of Zelda, RPG, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Super Mario Bros. games) ^note  Making it quite similar to the Recap/ namespace but for game levels and missions.
• Video Games that feature Multiple Endings. (i.e. Henry Stickmin Series, The Stanley Parable, and a lot of the games from Telltale Games)
• Works that craft an expansive and in depth world in order to make the audience feel invested. (i.e. Amphibia, Avatar, Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Chronicles of Narnia, Conan the Barbarian, Craig of the Creek, The Dragon Prince, Star Wars, Tolkien's Legendarium)
• Theme Parks. So tropers know where their favorite attractions are located!

But those are my thoughts. Feel free to share your ideas on how a namespace of this type could work!

I personally really like this idea, but beyond information i wonder what visual component we could have. Wether it's people uploading images or somehow letting people create their own.

I assume setting-based tropes such can be put there, just like we have a Characters/ tab.

Not sure what we'd do for images, though. Wikisize would be terrible for this.

I feel like maps/images of real world locations would be a step too far from the site's mission and goals. Plus I'm wary of the legality of hosting such maps/images without specific permissions. So Theme Parks and the like are probably not going to work out.

Additionally, I have to ask to what degree does this fall under Just for Fun, especially if it's going to host fan creations instead of official images?

Yeah, I'm... a little confused about the exact proposal here? Typically, when people suggest a "setting/" namespace it's just to be a setting-version of Characters/. Not... this.

The All The Tropes and Tropedia examples linked above are a setting-version of Characters/. Potentially doable, IMO.

The Fandom example is something completely different — a map with markers that list info about that location and/or link to an article on that location.

So in that case, the first 3 ideas would be the best way to go? So Tropers could, like, make level guides?

Just picture it: Setting.New Super Mario Bros Wii has Setting.New Super Mario Bros Wii World 9 Dash 1 listed as one of its subentries, with tropes pertaining to that specific level.

I'm in general skeptical we can describe a setting in such a way that would justify a page separate from the work page. For most works it would be just 0-4 tropes to describe the enviroment, maybe 20 for large franchises.

As for maps, we can just add a link to an worldmal to Image Links page.

If there are enough settings to warrant such a namespace, then I agree.

But first I'll need to see if there are actually any settings with enough tropes to make a subpage.

It occured to me that Wide-Open Sandbox games (i.e. Don't Starve, Minecraft, No Man's Sky, Starbound, Subnautica, Terraria and the like) tend to feature a large variety of biomes, each with unique terrain generation, mobs, items, etc. Could such a namespace work in that regard?

Characters.Star Wars Planets And Races and Characters.Game Of Thrones Westeros would probably be what such a page would look like (and yes I think this is misuse of Characters/). I don't know if less, uh, expansive settings could get such a page.

Edited by Synchronicity on May 15th 2023 at 11:29:10 AM

It's best to argue with a Sandbox/ page. I know sandbox games have a a lot of regions, but 1. It may be difficult to put into tropes. 2. A page full of "has a forest area", "has a lava area", "has a snow area" may instead show it being an issue.

Would be a good example if it wasn't mostly about races, unless we also include them as Settings. Worldbuilding?

Edited by Amonimus on May 15th 2023 at 7:30:10 PM

Thinking about it, I'd rather approach this from a perspective of how TVTropes is structured. In this regard, I think the only way this would be practical would be applying a standard similar (but not identical) to Franchise/ pages, in that a single Setting/ page or such covers a setting shared by several work pages.

Said work pages would not necessarily have to all be in different namespaces, but there would probably need to be more than three of them.

Following up on this observation about the Star Wars planets page, I, too, have concerns about likely "story world" pages conflating both "story setting" and "fictional culture." While these can seemingly go hand-in-hand in describing a "world" or "universe," they are actually two completely separate things.

I don't know that they are, actually. Setting Gimmicks has a pretty nebulous continuum between traits that apply to a location (Crystal Landscape) and traits that apply to a culture (Socially Scored Society), with most of them being traits that could apply to either or both depending on narrative preference. (Tropes like World of Badass and World of Pun are generally setting-wide, but they certainly aren't geographical and there's no particular reason someone couldn't write a Planet of Hats whose hat is "everything that happens here has a philosophical theme on a level no other planet does".) Setting as a Character links some of them together.

I mean, culture is very heavily based on geography and other setting details. It's a massive part of worldbuilding — understanding how the place a society is set in will dictate how that society functions. It'd be weird to say that such tropes wouldn't be allowed under a "World" or "Setting" namespace.

[1] Characters.Avatar The Last Airbender has a similar thing going on, where information about the 4 nations is listed at the bottom of the page.

I think Totemic Hero has the right idea. A Setting/ namespace would be appropriate for worlds in which multiple stories are set, most of which are currently shoehorned into namespaces where they don't really fit.

For example, Franchise.Marvel Universe covers tropes found in one specific comic setting, when the Franchise/ namespace is in principle supposed to cover tropes that run through multiple incarnations of a multimedia property, à la Franchise.Transformers.

Then there's Tabletopgame.Greyhawk. The big issue here is that there is no such RPG as Greyhawk. Greyhawk is one of several settings in Dungeons & Dragons, which is a tabletop game, unlike Greyhawk.

As I see it, both a Setting/ namespace would be more appropriate for both the Marvel Universe and Greyhawk.

Agreed. I think a Setting/ namespace could work for situations like what VB is describing.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Jun 18th 2023 at 10:51:12 AM

As someone who loves detailed worldbuilding and Expanded Universes in fiction, I'm... actually a little skeptical as to how useful this is. In fiction, the worldbuilding is always there to serve the story, and often can't really stand on its own. Even in tabletop games, it's still there to serve the story of either the ones playing the game, or the fiction created set in the universe.

I could see this working for online worldbuilding projects like Serina or Mystery Flesh Pit National Park, but even they already have tropeable storytelling elements weaved into them, and a "setting" section would just be redundant.

I agree. Worldbuilding is part of a story; the tropes it conjures up should go on the relevant work pages.

Even if you look at it through the lens of franchises, it falls flat, since we already have a Franchise/ namespace, which can be broken apart with headers for ease of navigation. Franchise.Marvel Universe and Literature.Greyhawk definitely seem like misuse of their pages going by peoples' arguments, but the tropes listed can easily be moved to the works within, or to an actual Franchise/ page.

Yeah, I don't think there's anything worthwhile here. A setting is not a separable component of a work of fiction.

Perhaps that is true. I’ll rescind my support.

I don't agree — you could say the same about characters, and we've got Characters/ pages.

To me, the thorny part is what counts as a setting trope. Tropes about fictional geography would obviously count, but what about tropes about fictional cultures? Species? Wildlife?

In the same vein that not all works may benefit from having a separate Characters page, the same applies to splitting off settings tropes. But there are plenty of Constructed Worlds. Something like TabletopGame.Greyhawk could hypothetically go under Settings.Dungeons And Dragons Greyhawk. Or something like Harry Potter's Hogwarts under Settings.Harry Potter, or Settings.Harry Potter Hogwarts.

Partially joking mode: Character pages are a hot mess and if they didn't currently exist I'd agree that they'd be an odd thing to have. I wouldn't say that their existence can be used to argue in favor of anything since most of the time they're in a bad and confusing state.

Less joking now: My main issue with the idea of a Setting/ namespace is that it's another example of people trying to split everything off into categories. Many works won't even have a robust enough setting to warrant such a split in the first place, and with the misuse that character pages receive already, what would be left on the main work page other than the basic, bare-bones plot information?

I guess I just don't feel like it's necessary to have yet another type of work subpage to have to split off examples, clean, and crosswick.