Not Thriving: Testing The Love Interest

Note: This thread was proposed by amathieu13.

Trope's been around since 2011 and has only 19 wicks and 8 legitimate on page examples (there are some ZCE commented out). When I first stumbled across the page, it had 23 wicks, but after noticing the few on page examples, I went through the wicks to see if I could find some not crosswicked ones that I could add, only to find that the ones not already on the page were misusing the trope.

This trope is kind of hard to summarize broadly and briefly, but it covers the scenario of "Bob starts dating Alice and is Childhood Friends with Girl Next Door Christie, who he never saw romantically. Bob and Christie have an inside joke (or something similar) that they've kept going for years. Bob randomly tries that joke out with Alice (this is the "test" in the title), but she responds with a deadpan/confusion because she doesn't get it. This makes Bob realize he and Alice aren't compatible and that he is actually in love with Christie. Cue Relationship Upgrade and Childhood Friend Romance."

It doesn't need to follow that exact formula or include those exact characters (Christie can be a mentor or the rival, etc so long as the relationship is thought to be fully platonic at the beginning), but that's the basic structure. See original draft here.

This is definitely a thing I've seen (though no examples immediately come to mind), so I think the lack of wicks comes down to a lack of proper crosswicking, a semi-vague name, and what once was a kind of sparse/confusing description (I beefed it up some before I realized how extensive the issue was). The misuse I saw (and removed) interpreted "test" differently which led to examples covering:

• a character giving someone a large and important feat to complete to explicitly see if they are worthy of their love
• a character exploiting another's feelings for them to get them to do something for them, i.e. "if you love me you'd do [thing]"

...neither of which are what this trope is, though they may be tropeworthy concepts to yard.

Recommendation: I think this one would be ok to send back to the TLP to get examples. Given the bit of misuse, we might want to consider renaming it as well, but if we send it back to the TLP, we can hash that out there.

Paging ~amathieu13 to the thread.

i got nothing really to add to my OP, except the observation that some of the misuse was there from this trope's draft stage, despite the description being more or less the same. a very odd draft that likely should have never been launched to begin with.

Agreed with sending it back.

Agree with sending it back to TLP.

I agree with sending it back to TLP, and since there was a draft, the unlaunch button can be used.

I was thinking about handling the unlaunch the same way as with Monsters Favorite Petting Spot, by copying and pasting the current page into the draft, unlaunching, and putting the draft Up for Grabs, but if the fact that this is several years older than that trope means a new draft would be preferable, we could Yard it if nobody here sponsors it. (I feel like there may have been at least one case of a TRS thread sending a trope with an existing draft back to TLP without reusing the original draft, but I forgot what it was.)

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jul 6th 2023 at 8:53:27 AM

to resending to TLP.

yarding is also fine. i initially said send back to TLP because I had initially wanted to sponsor it myself, but my schedule irl is changing and I'd rather not.

Send it back to TLP.

So far that's 10 votes, counting the OP. We can probably waive this now—unless the OP doesn't count as a vote?

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Jul 8th 2023 at 7:28:15 AM

Back to TLP

Who would sponsor it?

It's been unlaunched, and here's the draft (which I copied the page's contents to), but I also made Sandbox.Testing The Love Interest if starting a new draft would be preferable due to how old the original is.

It's been dewicked, so locking up.