Yeah, I personally don't like overly broad tropes that try to catch too many meanings of a single action or aspect, which I genuinely feel people are trying to push for. To quote from People Sit on Chairs:

Indeed, people sitting in chairs can be a trope if there's that added element of a meaningful connection or pattern to recognize. For instance, the chair may be impossibly awesome, which gives you an idea of who might be sitting in it. Or the chair might be a more functional Super Wheelchair. Or the first time we encounter the character, their back may be to the audience until they swivel around in their chair. Or they may be sitting in a chair that's claimed by someone else. Or the Big Bad might be slouching in the chair and showing off their badness. Or the chair might be conspicuous by its emptiness. These are all real tropes involving a chair and somebody sitting (or not sitting) in it. But what makes them tropes is that there's something meaningful to the characters in the story using the chair in such a way.

A character just going without shoes without any nuance in itself is way too broad, and if there is important nuance then it should be its own page (if there aren't enough examples, then, well it might just be Too Rare to Trope). Yes super tropes exist, but generally they're pretty specific and meaningful in themselves with the subtropes being even more specific variants.

The intended purpose of Does Not Like Shoes is that a character is characterized by their lack of shoes like how many characters are known for being Never Bareheaded. I think it's only worth noting if the work calls attention to it in the narrative or the character explicitly shows that they hate shoes.

Here's some on page examples I salvaged

• Akebi's Sailor Uniform: Downplayed with Komichi; while she'll wear shoes when she has to, she'll still take her shoes and socks off at the first opportunity. This is lampshaded during her first phys ed class, where everyone does a lap around the school racetrack while being timed. Akebi gets weird and astonished reactions for some reason, and the camera deliberately strays away from showing anything below her calves. Then, it's shown that Akebi is running barefoot with track dirt soiling her soles, indicating that she took off her shoes and socks. She gets an impressive time, and as she is wiping her feet, she concludes that she runs faster barefoot. Her teacher understandably scolded her because she could have gotten hurt doing that.
• Cricket on Big City Greens hates wearing shoes. Even at a dance, when he's otherwise in formal wear, he's barefoot. The only time he willingly wears shoes is in cold weather, treating it the same as wearing a jacket.
• Nisa from Mission Odyssey doesn't wear shoes because she likes being barefoot. However, in episode 17, she and the others visit an icy land, and when they enter a kingdom warmed by magic crystals, the sweltering floor is too hot for her bare feet to handle. She's then given a pair of fur-lined shoes when their ruler notes she has sensitive feet unlike them, who have adapted to the conditions. Unfortunately, the citizens are all huge in stature and the shoes fall off quite easily, so she goes snooping around in the hope of finding a pair more her petite size and stumbles upon something she wasn't meant to see, resulting in her being taken captive. Ironically, the one time she wears shoes, the rest of her friends are alerted to the fact she's in trouble when one of the shoes falls off again as she's carted off to a dungeon and they find it in the snow. She reverts back to being a barefooter after this adventure. A couple of other characters don't wear shoes among the crew, either, being inhuman species.
• K.O., the main character of OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes, never wears shoes, only leg warmers. The game Let's Play Heroes reveals he never figured out how to tie the laces so he stopped wearing footwear altogether. This is lampshaded on more than one occasion by his friend Dendy in-series.
• Tommy Pickles from Rugrats (1991) is almost always seen barefoot, in contrast to most of the other babies on the show. It is explained in the A Day in the Life of Tommy book that the reason for this is because Tommy likes to feel the mud squish between his toes. The episodes in which Tommy does wear shoes are few and far between. This does not apply to his eleven-year-old counterpart in the All Grown Up! spin-off.

Edited by MacronNotes on Jun 17th 2023 at 3:05:00 PM

I can see that, though I think it would need to be carefully renamed and redescribed to prevent the chairsy "this character doesn't wear shoes" use that plagues the trope in its current form.

The best name I can come up with would be something like Enjoys Going Barefoot and I'm concerned it might still draw misuse.

I'd prefer Prefers Going Barefoot instead of Enjoys Going Barefoot if we're going by the work stating it's a preference.

, plus the requirement that the character's preference for going barefoot must be explicitly stated / commented by either the narrative or the character in question, otherwise it's not this trope.

Amathieu, why did you only quote this part but not the rest of what I said which expanded on this?

First of all, I think tropes are noteworthy most of the time if they don't happen in real life, just in fiction. People use knives and maybe axes as weapons, so it's not remarkable when a character uses them in fiction. IRL, whips are used in BDSM or as punishment (tho not anymore nowadays) which are covered by other tropes so they don't need a "character uses whips" trope.

On the other hand, however, being barefoot outside by choice isn't the norm. It's unusual and it must mean something to the character as to why they prefer being barefoot all the time. Same as for Going Commando. It's not the norm, and it's usually for fanservice or bc the character wants to feel free, etc.

That does make them remarkable in some way. It's not comparable with "character uses X." Preferring abandoning footwear or underwear is an interesting thing about the character, compared to a typical common thing as using a knife or whatever for fighting.

Except do we really care if a trope is notable if it's not in itself meaningful? I mean, we don't care how notable a trope is if it's meaningful in some way (see omnipresent and overdosed tropes) and TRS routinely cuts tropes that have no meaning in and of themselves.

I mean there was a time where having lesbians in school was notable (and to some extent it still is) but That didn't make Schoolgirl Lesbians a meaningful trope in itself and that's why it was disambiguated.

I quoted that part because it was the central argument you made and all of your other points supported that, so I didn't feel the need to address them one by one. But if you'd like:

The particular weapon a character uses also has a reason, even if the narrative doesn't spell it out. But "character uses / likes to use a weapon" is a general concept that we've decided lacks meaning when separated out by individual weapon, thus Weapon Specialization (a decision I agree with). The reason why a character would use a specific weapon however, we've decided to capture with specific tropes that detail the point of characterization that weapon highlights.

People can and do go barefoot by choice all of the time: in their homes, to prevent dirtiness; outside, if they don't want their shoes to get dirty or to play around; young children rarely want to wear shoes because it feels too restricting, etc. There are plenty of mundane reasons why a character would willingly not wear shoes, which is my point: to me, this trope is too broad and lumps together actual tropeworthy depictions with non-tropeworthy ones, similar to the weapons tropes. Using Macron's post, I think even these examples aren't really simply "character likes not wearing shoes":

Edited by amathieu13 on Jun 17th 2023 at 10:44:18 AM

At this point I think a crowner should be hooked. I can't think of any other way to resolve this dispute.

Crowners are typically posted three days after a thread is opened to allow for discussion to happen and different viewpoints to be heard. No need to rush the process if there's an on-going discussion.

Edited by amathieu13 on Jun 17th 2023 at 7:33:40 AM

I may be wrong, but I think there's a three day wait before a crowner is hooked so that everyone gets a chance to weigh in. It's been under 24h thus far.

Edit:

Edited by Yindee on Jun 17th 2023 at 7:34:35 AM

This is the previous thread for Does Not Like Shoes where the question was asked if the trope required that character explicitly didn't like shoes. The trope always had problems but I think people found that Foot Focus as being the bigger because it used to be a page that catergorized every time someone's foot was shown on camera. We spilt off specific trope from Foot Focus and redirected it to These Tropes Are Made for Walking. That's were some of the more specific barefoot tropes come from and I helped with the project by drafting up Earthy Barefoot Character.

I'd prefer to save this and rebuild it as new name but the misuse probably runs too deep for that. The examples I listed can be filed under Meaningful Appearance. MA is supposed to be a catch all for meaningful appearance instances so we should use it instead (of course if there's enough examples for a specific concept we can always split it off)

Edited by MacronNotes on Jun 17th 2023 at 7:47:48 AM

My opinion is to rename it and cleanup misuse not fitting the new name. This isn't chairs no matter what arguments are against it.

^^ It's because of Three-Day Rule (although we have only been following it closely the past two years). Three days is usually the minimum when it comes to TRS threads that aren't starving. These things need to be talked out thoroughly and there's always room for someone to express a different opinion. In any case, this isn't the place to discuss this and when we have a crowner is always up to mod discretion.

Edited by MacronNotes on Jun 17th 2023 at 12:28:57 PM

So what's the meaning behind this trope? Trying to catch all the meanings tends to lead to a trope with no meaning, which is what happened with the disambiguated weapons tropes, and as PSOC says

"Conversely, an idea can still be "sitting in a chair" even if it rarely happens at all; for example, there may be only three works of fiction in which a person walks down a street called Jameson Street, but unless that name has some relevance to the storytelling beyond just being a street name, it's still a "chair"; there's no meaningful pattern or connection between these works, and the name of the street itself conveys nothing about the work."

Basically, what I'm saying is that unless there's some story or character relevance for someone not wearing shoes, that is explicitly or implicitly noted by the narrative or the characters, a character going without shoes is a chair.

I'm in favor of renaming and having the description focus on what it says about the character.

What does it say about the character? At least, beyond Meaningful Appearance's myriad reasons?

Barefoot Loon and Earthy Barefoot Character, plus the other cited tropes, would collect most of the reasonings I can readily think of. Leaning towards disambig (with an open mind for splitting off new tropes) now.

Mod hat off because I'm not acting as a mod with this post. I'm starting to lean toward either disambiguating between Barefoot Loon, Earthy Barefoot Character, and Meaningful Appearance or redirecting to These Tropes Are Made for Walking since I'm starting to feel that those comparing this to weapon tropes (in terms of whether it's meaningful or not) might have a point, and on top of that, I feel that other tropes might already have specific meanings covered already (including the tropes that were previously mentioned, which I mentioned again in this post).

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jun 17th 2023 at 8:16:37 AM

Oh right, those three exist. Well, disambig it is then.

I'm still against disambig/redirect, agree with a renaming to Barefooter/Prefers To Go Barefoot and cleanup though.

To my previous arguments, I would also add that people who go barefoot by choice is a notable subculture in Real Life whose members fend off social stigma associated with going barefoot (said stigma often having to do with tropes like Barefoot Poverty and Barefoot Loon), lobby against laws that prohibit people to go barefoot in public, etc. The barefooter subculture often uses iconic barefoot fictional characters as their mascots, and its existence, in turn, inspires the creation of new such characters.

Barefoot Loon doesn't always imply "by choice": say, a patient who escaped from an asylum would usually be depicted as wearing a straightjacket and having bare feet. This would convey the subtext "bare feet=crazy", but they are not barefoot by choice, and would probably put on a pair of shoes as soon as they find one.

@Yindee: It could say that the character is too lazy or slovenly to bother with shoes, imply a savage/brutish nature, are a practitioner of a martial art, has a condition where being barefoot would help (such as blindness), etc. Anything not covered by the tropes mentioned.

Every single one of those things sounds like a separate trope to me, and would be better served split into those things if so. disambig.

How would making separate tropes for all of those things be of any help? All of them would just be The Same, but More Specific.

Edited by Rynnec on Jun 18th 2023 at 9:58:08 AM