How broad can a trope be before it becomes PSOC?

Spun off the Does Not Like Shoes TRS thread.

In said thread, there's been a lot of discussion about whether people going without shoes is itself tropable, and whether a trope page that covers every possible meaning aside from those in the subtropes counts as People Sit on Chairs or not. This sort of led me to the broader question of where the line is in regard to whether something is chairs or not, where the line is for being meaningful enough to be a trope and not just chairs.

I'm not trying to end-run around the thread, for the record. I asked if it was a good idea there and Gaston, not acting in a mod capacity, thought it would be since it seems likely that thread will end with no action.

To quote the page itself:

If it doesn't change the story in any way or act as a shorthand to give the reader ideas of what to expect, it's chairs.

Going without shoes isn't, in and of itself, a trope. But if it's a part of a character's design which informs the reader that they're, say, mad, connected to the ground, or a captive, that's when it becomes a trope.

Trying to cover "visual trait, but "meaningful"" often results in an accumulation of "just the visual trait" examples, as the old appearance trope cleanup thread can attest to. If there's enough specific meaning in a visual trait, it needs to be its own trope.

To me it seems exactly the same as what's been going on with the weapons tropes: just "X character uses y weapon" is not a trope, but specific cases that use weapon choice to convey personality or similar, "X character uses a bow to indicate a distant personality", is.

It's not really about broadness, but about whether or not you can objectively say it has meaning. Something like Does Not Like Shoes, which covers a range of cases, tries to have meaning... but fails in practice to, because of the poor title and lack of a focus, not necessarily because it's a broad trope.

The issue really boils down to when something doesn't seem to require any deeper meaning or relevancy, not just something being too broad. Many of the most universal tropes around (like Character Death) are as broad as can be, but still matter because they have an impact on the narrative or characters. Even when individual methods of death may be seen as shaky, Character Death itself has never been seen as a chair because it's something that'll always matter to the story.

There are some Omnipresent Tropes that are so ubiquitous that making the effort to list examples is kind of pointless, but that doesn't mean it ceases to be a trope. A lot of technical tropes like Shot/Reverse Shot serve a specific purpose, even if it's not a particularly original or creative choice.

People Sit on Chairs was made to counter issues where people were proposing things that merely exist, ranging from a particular car to walking through a doorway. Tropes are about finding a piece to a larger puzzle. Even tropes like Big Applesauce is not merely "This is where the story takes place" but is a collection of common New York stories and how it's treated as the center of importance.

I think a trope is PSOC if you can write something that feels like a Zero-Context Example yet still fulfill the trope's definition.

So if these aren't ZCE:

• Blade On A Stick: Bob uses a spear.
• Does Not Like Shoes: Bob doesn't wear shoes.

Then the "tropes" aren't conveying anything meaningful.

Yeah, that's a good way to summarize it. It's not about how broad a trope is, moreso if the full context would require it to have meaning.

We had this issue with title tropes too, where people wanted to contextualize them, but it was theoretically impossible for the ones that had no extra meaning.

To use Does Not Like Shoes as an example:

• Does Not Like Shoes: Alice is barefoot. Chairs.
• Does Not Like Shoes: Alice is the only character of the main cast to be consistently barefoot. Not only this makes her stand out, but it also indicates that Alice is X, Y, Z. Not chairs.

But if the trope's definition allows for examples that look like the first one, then the problem is with the trope. You can add details about why the lack of shoes is significant, but if it's actually a meaningful trope, then you should have to do that on every example.

Right. The issue is that as-is, both versions are acceptable which means the trope doesn't require meaning to be present. If the first version was deemed to be lacking in some way, it would mean that the trope has meaning that must be provided.

Mismatched Eyes was one of the first tropes to be disambiguated for chairs concerns and it was about a rare and unique physical trait. We split it into multiple tropes with more meaningful like Duality Motif, Shared Unusual Trait, and Mark of the Supernatural. Purple Eyes was considered not chairs specifically because it didn't exist in real life but every meaningful use was covered by another eye/personal appearance trope.

Does Not Like Shoes is supposed for characters that defined by the fact that they are almost always barefoot like Never Bareheaded characters are defined by always wearing headgear like I said in the TRS. However, the description left room for the decay to set in. Does Not Like Shoes was looked over in the past because it at least had more of a standing than Foot Focus (which was split into several barefoot tropes like Earthy Barefoot Character and Barefoot Poverty and redirected to These Tropes Are Made for Walking) but it's had the same issues for over a decade.

Edited by MacronNotes on Jun 21st 2023 at 11:32:52 AM

for and

Edited by ElRise on Jun 21st 2023 at 11:32:41 PM

I also think this is a good base understanding of things. I think where things get contentious is when there is more context given, in terms of providing a reason why a character doesn't like X, however the trope doesn't demand a singular reason.

• Bob doesn't like shoes because he doesn't like the feel of his feet being restricted.
• Alice doesn't like shoes because she grew up a Wild Child and didn't wear them.
• Cassie doesn't like shoes because she spends a lot of time painting her toe nails and likes to shoe them off as much as possible.

Etc. All of those would be considered valid full context examples, but to me, I don't really see what this is trying to say other than "character doesn't like shoes". There are numerous reasons why a person IRL or a character in a work can like/dislike something. Taken as a whole, there's no consistent meaning being conveyed outside of "character doesn't like X".

It's like the opposite of a Trope in Aggregate, which already walks the fine line between being tropeworthy and not. A Trope in Aggregate has a consistent form and meaning only when seen in the broader context of other examples. A single bald-headed tough guy does not a trope make, but when that association is repeated again and again, even if we don't fully know where the association is coming from, it is a notable pattern and so it becomes tropeworthy. With these kinds of tropes however, looking at the examples together shows a distinct lack of a pattern apart from just the behavior/trait. There's no consistent meaning attached to the trait other than what is there at face value: this character doesn't like X, which is where I think the broadness starts moving into chairs territory.

Edited by amathieu13 on Jun 21st 2023 at 11:45:57 AM

There's definitely been a shift in what a trope is considered to be as a result of the emphasis on PSOC. We used to have a lot of tropes about things that happen or exist, that always happen or exist for a reason, but the tropes themselves were agnostic as to what those reasons are. (Many soft-split tropes are a result of this.) Increasingly, we're flipping that the other way around, having tropes for certain goals a writer might have, certain reasons for doing things, that encompass many different ways to effect those goals or fulfill those reasons.

To take MacronNotes' Mismatched Eyes example, having mismatched eyes is something that doesn't occur in real life (usually), isn't something that you'd do just to have an answer to the "what eye color does this character have" question, and stands out enough, that if it appears in a work it must have a reason behind it. But because it didn't matter what that reason was, "Bob has one blue eye and one green eye" was technically a valid example even if it wasn't helpful. So now we have several tropes about the reasons characters might have mismatched eyes that can also apply to Purple Eyes or various other Personal Appearance Tropes that might once have similarly covered any possible reason behind those things.

From my perspective, part of the idea behind PSOC was to explain why TV Tropes wasn't like The Other Wiki's "in popular culture" sections that would list every banal appearance of a common object in fiction, regardless of relevance, as a result of people wanting to promote their favorite work. We don't have pages listing every appearance of wood in fiction, or every appearance of a chair, or a car, or a house, or whatever. But this was also a time when the wiki's official conception of what a trope is was shifting. For a long time, our Trope page said:

On this wiki, trope has an even more general meaning of a recognizable pattern — not only within the media works themselves, but also in related aspects such as the behind-the-scenes aspects of creation, the technical features of a medium, and the fan experience.

Taken literally, this would suggest that as used on the wiki, Trivia items and YMMV entries were just as much tropes as the things we consider full-fledged tropes today. Even people sitting on chairs could be considered a "recognizable pattern" in fiction.

During the late 00s and early 10s there was an effort to tighten the definition of "trope" used on the wiki, partly as a response to the backlash against the Wild West days of the wiki, partly to clarify what the purpose of the site is. PSOC's emphasis on a trope needing to have meaning is a result of that shift.

But while this definition, and the idea of the wiki as a resource for writers, was embraced by the administration, mods, and people who frequent the left-side forums, I don't think it's ever been fully embraced by the user base as a whole. Beyond the areas where this concept has been enforced on the wiki, I think most tropers still consider the purpose of the site, from their perspective, to be to collect examples of anything that can complete a sentence starting with "You Know That Thing Where...". They wouldn't list off every example of a chair or car or house in fiction, but they would consider the appearance of mismatched eyes to be a "recognizable pattern", so why can't they list every character that has mismatched eyes? If someone wants to read about why and how characters in fiction would have mismatched eyes, and a list of every character the nerds on this site have found with them, and maybe even learn some things about why a character might have mismatched eyes and how they're treated, why do they have to be split up across multiple tropes about more general reasons for a character's appearance to be a certain way, which would still miss some examples if the reason for them being that way can't be determined or, in some cases, because they're a Mary Sue whose author has made them that way just to make them more "spechul", or some other reason that might be grounds for Flame Bait?

In other words, an entry that may be interesting or entertaining to the reader, even one that wasn't involved in crafting it or otherwise familiar with the wiki, might not align with our goals for the site or our standards for what a trope is. "Character goes barefoot all the time" is an interesting pattern, but by our standards, not necessarily a trope by itself. I'm not necessarily saying this shift is a good or bad thing - as suggested before, it's been key to resolving issues with technically-not-ZCEs and Type Labels Are Not Examples - but it's why I could understand if people feel that TRS likes to cut valid tropes for no good reason and that "the cabal" is trying to mold the wiki in their image, and why I usually stay away from PSOC discussions.

See, I'm not even convinced that something like Mismatched Eyes "was always there for a reason". What if the actor just had heterochromia? I genuinely don't believe that tropes like these, which could reasonably just happen by happenstance, are always inherently meaningful unless the writer does have a goal behind it. I've never subscribed to the "everything in a story has meaning" school of thought, as a writer myself I understand that some details are just for flavor and don't impact my story in any real way.

And yeah, I also fully see this wiki as an informative source, and I believe it's important for things on it to be accurate and helpful. Any people who don't visit the forums and see things differently are always welcome to vote or visit TRS or something to try and see tropes they like survive the process. So... IDK if we can definitively say what any "non-forumites" truly think, because they don't show up to these discussions and won't tell us one way or another. Sure, some of them probably just see the site as a silly place to read about something random that happens in media, but we can't assume they ALL subscribe to that or even that most of them do.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 22nd 2023 at 1:14:09 PM

I think the philosophical difference is over to what extent "for the flavour" is a tropable reason.

With character design tropes especially - when a single feature like "baldness" has such a wide range of associations, musculature and sickness and enlightenment and evil and authority and so on, it doesn't seem wrong to say "baldness is associated with whatever character role the artist wanted to have it because giving characters distinct appearances helps audiences identify them". The difference between that and "flavour" is pretty abstract.

Again, what if that's just how the actor (or the voice actor, on occasion) happens to look? Not every work is going to go out of their way to make their actors fit specific character appearances, and that needs to be accounted for.

And if "Bob is bald" is an acceptable trope entry, then there's no inherent meaning to be had. If it can be given meaning, well... then we would have a trope for that meaning. I don't think that "makes a character look distinct" is in and of itself a trope, especially if it can be as simple as "the creator wanted a bald character" or "the actor themselves is bald and it is never addressed as part of the character".

I've always had the personal feeling that tropes are based on the pattern, and any story purpose derived from it is speculation but not definitive. So basically Spikes of Villainy is when evil characters have a costume tailored to sharp edges, the reason why could be anything from weaponry choices to fostering an ostentatious design to wanting a distinctive silhouette. You get too caught up in the story meaning and the pattern doesn't make sense.

When I made Shapeshifter Default Form, a shapeshifter that reliably uses one particular appearance, I listed two possible reasons for it (it is their natural form or was personally selected) hoping more options would be discovered in finding more examples. Instead it got roped into the "Type A, Type B" issue.

Not to get too sidetracked in this, but actors are cast partly based on their appearances (as well as acting ability, personality, budget...), and adjusting their appearance to their character is part of makeup and costuming (and sometimes set direction and cinematography). "Wearing a wig" and "not wearing a wig" are both artistic choices.

Untangling all of this interconnected decision-making is pointless, of course, because it all happens offscreen - which means that the original reasons for what was prioritised and why don't actually matter individually, because the final product was approved for publication.

I mean, it can happen but doesn't always. I can think of several works right now where an actor's lack of hair (or an actor's heterochromia) wasn't so much as commented on, let alone relevant to the character.

That's why I'm resistant to these things. A trope that can be boiled down to merely the appearance of an actor, even in cases where it's legitimately just a type of Color Blind Casting, no-one behind the scenes cared to change it, and it has no in-story relevancy, doesn't feel like a trope to me. And I don't see that opinion changing any time soon.

I'm lost in your first paragraph, sorry. What can happen but doesn't always?

"Character is bald because actor is bald" and "no one cared to change it" are exactly the kinds of reasons I'm taking about that don't matter. What matters is what's onscreen. Everything that the audience can see is tautologically relevant to how they perceive the artwork - script, intonation, body language, appearance, set design, camera movement, scene transitions, soundtrack, foley work, computer effects, everything. Whether it's because the director was an auteur who insisted on this particular detail, or if it was just an acceptable side effect of some other choice, is trivia.

I mean that it's entirely possible for an actor to be chosen for acting ability alone (or simply because it's a very small pool to choose from), for the crew to not do anything about it, and for the character's appearance to ultimately have no relevancy. Basically, I was disputing your claim that the crew would always account for these things. Or even care.

My point is that, if an actor's appearance is entirely incidental, never discussed in the work, never made relevant to their character, and does not follow a pattern, it doesn't fit our definition of a "trope". It's just there. The behind-the-scenes stuff is important because IF they changed it it would imply that the appearance matters to the character. Them ignoring it means that the character's appearance isn't something that's meant to add anything to the story, it's entirely random. And tropes can't be random.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 22nd 2023 at 11:04:05 AM

...I'm not claiming that, though?

"adjusting their appearance to their character is part of makeup and costuming (and sometimes set direction and cinematography). "Wearing a wig" and "not wearing a wig" are both artistic choices."

This is what I'm disputing. That "not wearing a wig" is an artistic choice that holds meaning, which in my experience it very often is not. It can be but that doesn't mean that any time a bald actor appears without modification is meaningful. Sometimes people just legitimately don't give a shit.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 22nd 2023 at 11:05:39 AM

Everything that affects what the audience sees is an artistic choice, a financial choice, a political choice, etc. It isn't worth trying to untangle any of that because none of it affects whether a trope is meaningful. Tropes acquire meaning from their relationship in context to the rest of the art, not from backstage.