Applied Phlebotinum: Trope or index?

Applied Phlebotinum confuses me.

• On one hand, it has a full description, a page quote, an image, video examples, and subpages, making it look just like a trope page.
• On the other hand, its page type is Index, and it has no examples, just a big list of related tropes.

My first instinct is that it's meant to be an exampleless Super-Trope, but the page type makes me doubt that.

Is it okay to include Applied Phlebotinum as a trope in a work's page if none of the subtropes work?

i believe that's the intended use, yeah. Fanservice is another trope that's primarily an index but permissible to use as a standard trope if none of the more specific sub-tropes apply

But Fanservice has the Trope page type. Should Applied Phlebotinum's page type be changed too, then?

It does look like Trope would be more appropriate. Also there is a page type correction thread here.

Surprisingly, this page has never had on-page examples of the sort we would recognize. It seems to have evolved more or less linearly from how it was in the sytes.net days, when "examples" were just worked into the description, and CSI continued to have an in-description "example" until 2012.

For most of the Fast Eddie era, this page was listed on the sidebar along with certain other basic types of tropes, and it continues to be a first-level bullet point on Narrative Tropes, none of the others of which are treated as tropes. Notably, Applied Phlebotinum was treated as a category of trope, and wasn't listed so much as a trope itself, as far back as the Tropes page has had a list of categories of tropes, again going back to the sytes.net days. So you can see how whoever set the page type back in ~2010 would have seen it as an index more than a trope.

Edited by MorganWick on May 23rd 2023 at 2:18:36 AM