A Namespace About Story Worlds

It's not a quote from anywhere in particular, it was just a summation of my own devising.

Honestly, the misuse of the character page might be a good place to start. Arknights has a few pages near the bottom that have character entries but are overall troping parts of the setting. Mass Effect Race Tropes is basically a big old setting index. Tolkien's Legendarium: Peoples is another one that's basically a setting page anyhow.

I'm still not sure what the point of Setting/ is if it really is just for novel settings, again it seems too limited to justifying having its own type of subpage. Characters is at least a universal concept in fiction, but while every story has a setting, not every setting is gonna be narratively important or can be troped on its own. Even the pages cited there are still made up of characters, so I can see why they're there even if they seem out of place.

I think this discussion also overlaps wider debates I've seen in fandom circles, this resentment towards "wiki/lore culture" and people only focusing on the setting and not the story. There's plenty to debate with that, and I can see how this discussion reflects that divide so far. I think, in the context of this site, we should be focusing on troping fiction as fiction and not as "lore" persay, since we're not the kind of wiki that catalogues information that way.

I think it's a stretch to say that they're 'made up of characters'. Yes, the Arknights page does list characters associated with groups or political entities (where they're not in some other page)—but it also separates them from the tropes specific to the organisation or nation as a whole, which are far more setting oriented. And the Tolkien page isn't about characters at all.

It'd also help if what "Settings" means is clarified, at it can mean either Settings, Worldbuilding, Locations or Roleplaying lore set, and some of the prior arguments didn't feel like they're on same page.

As someone who came here especially to document and find settings, in order to potentially play within them in a TTRPG, here is my grain of salt:

I have looked through the A and B sections of the Star Wars[1] trope page, and I found most of the tropes listed surprisingly useful for my needs. The thing is, information about recurring spoken lines, themes, absurd technologies, illogical cliches, plot points, etc, are just as important as places and events when it comes to understand a fictional setting.

Now, obviously the tropes order is a complete mess. It is completely impossible to quickly have an overview of how the technology is portrayed in Star Wars, for example. But I think the solution to this lies in a feature allowing us to filter the tropes according to tags, rather than listing tropes on a subpage.

There are still a few tropes listed that are not very informative for someone trying to discover the universe (like Action Figure File Card), but there were surprisingly few of them. I expected the content I was looking for to be drown under a mass of useless tropes, but that's not the case. And if Star Wars manages to have a relatively clean list of tropes, I don't see why other franchises couldn't.

In conclusion, it doesn't seem to me that a Setting/ namespace is necessary. I may change my mind as I use this site more, but for now that's my opinion. If anything, I think the ability to filter the listed tropes using a tag system would truly enhance the experience, although I realize that such a feature is difficult to implement.