Just What Is an "Enforced Trope"

Last night, Enforced Trope came under some scrutiny as the result of this discussion. Not only did we discover that one part of the page was added by a now-suspended troper, but the line in general on what is/isn't an Enforced Trope has become controversial. One of the users involved asked that I make the Trope Talk, and I agreed, so here it is.

Now, off the bat I'll start with a little hot take. And that's that... I'm not sure this has any business being one of our "Played With" concepts? It's not our job to analyze why writers stick specific tropes into works, and it has no bearing on how the trope is actually used in story. I would be A-OK if we just scrapped the dang thing, though obviously that's just my opinion.

Probably limiting it to Show Within a Show examples would be nice. In that case, IMHO, it will be simpler to just list it as a subtype of Invoked Trope.

There are multiple different definitions floating around at the moment.

• Playing with a Trope says: "The trope occurs solely because of outside expectations or obligations placed on the writer, such as Executive Meddling or censorship."
• Trope Tropes says: "There is a specific out-of-universe reason a trope was used in a work, e.g. Executive Meddling or budget constraints."

There's a pretty big gap between these two definitions.

"A specific out-of-universe reason" is incredibly broad. An author liking a trope is a specific out-of-universe reason. So are genre conventions. By that definition, just about any trope used in anything could be considered an enforced trope. And if everything's enforced, then it's not a meaningful concept anymore.

I personally suggest the definition be narrowed down to what the name "enforced" implies: just forced reasons.

Edited by Eievie on Dec 29th 2023 at 4:13:22 AM

But what would be the difference between Enforced Trope and an author including a trope because they want to?

Edited by SoyValdo7 on Dec 29th 2023 at 6:13:37 AM

Yeah, that's where I'm at right now. I'm currently wondering why this is even a thing we need to be discussing; Playing With is supposed to be about ways a trope is used in a narrative. This is just trivia.

To me, "Enforced" = "Forced by outside factors" in this case, meaning if the trope didn't play out the way it is, it'd cause problems for the publishing.

But now that it's brought up, that's something that can only exist in Trivia or Analysis. On work pages, we only trope the objective content, not how it came to be. If it's not something we can Play With on work pages, I can entertain scrapping it, or merging with Creativity Leash index.

A lot of tropes are enforced by default (for example, anything having to do with censorship), which kind of makes me question how useful the distinction even is.

I think it's important to recognize the phenomenon but not in the same way as the other ways to Playing with a Trope.

I agree it has more in common with other "out-of-universe backstory" tropes — Author Appeal, Write Who You Know, etc — than it does with any other Playing With variation.

I just realized, isn't this plain old Executive Meddling?

At the moment, I personally would define it as a Super-Trope of Executive Meddling, but also including budget constraints, actor constraints, censorship, Product Placement, and more.

Edited by Eievie on Dec 29th 2023 at 4:39:13 AM

No? Executives are just one of many reasons mentioned.

Oh, you're right...

Regardless, I still agree that this shouldn't be Playing With and it would be better to merge it with an index. It's more of an explanation for why the trope is played straight, which is more or less the same no matter which trope is used in; it's always a form of "I'm obligated to include it".

Edited by SoyValdo7 on Dec 29th 2023 at 6:56:32 AM

Here's one story of why I think it's better as a Super-Trope than an index:

I was recently working on a page for the 12th-century poem Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart. As a medieval text, it was created within the artist-and-patron system. Marie was Countess of Champagne. Chrétien de Troyes served at her court as a poet. She requested he write a story with a certain plot, and so he did that. He appears to have been uncomfortable with his assigned topic of adultery framed as sexy, but he did it always because that's what you do as a medieval artist when your patron asks.

Enforced Trope was a useful term to describe this situation. There's no other good term for it. I could call it Executive Meddling, I guess? but that usually centers around what's perceived as marketable, which isn't the case here. There aren't enough other medieval works on this site that making a specific artist-and-patron page makes sense. So I think it's valuable to have Enforced Trope as a catch-all for the oddball examples like this which don't quite fit anywhere else.

Edited by Eievie on Dec 29th 2023 at 5:14:54 AM

I added the description used on Trope Tropes based on what I understood the definition to be at the time. At the time we had like two of the various Played With variations actually listed there, so I added the others pretty much in one go and described them as best I could.

I disagree with the statement that "specific out-of-universe reason" for a trope is needlessly broad. Speaking as a sometime writer myself, I think we forget sometimes that the way we describe tropes on this wiki isn't necessarily the way work creators actually think about them: they might have just felt like writing it that way rather than actually trying to use a specific trope, and might not even be aware of what other works have done that is similar.

One of the examples I've recently come across was a bit in Booty Royale: Never Go Down Without a Fight!. This series is very well-researched, and in this particular case the protagonist was unarmed against an assassin with a sword. The author's notes in the tankoubon specifically commented that, between two reasonably well-trained combatants, Never Bring A Knife To A Fistfight is a very unrealistic trope: the slogan "God made men; Samuel Colt made them equal" exists for a reason. Correspondingly, the protagonist recalls her father telling her to run like hell if she ever had to face an armed opponent, but this one is between her and the door.

So he did the first thing he could come up with to break the standoff: he had the MC distract the assassin by calling attention to the Raging Stiffie he'd sprouted and then punched his lights out when he glanced down. Quoth the author, "Sometimes a lazy punchline works".

Point being, this isn't just generically "the author used a trope": this is a citation that the author intentionally used a trope for a contextually specific reason, and not one that had anything to do with Executive Meddling or the equivalent.

For another variation, there was an example of a Franken-vehicle on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, where what was originally supposed to be an NX-class starship got turned into a mishmash of various ships including the saucer section from a Crossfield-class, because the crew had to reuse sets from Star Trek: Discovery—which revolves around a Crossfield-class—to save some of the episode budget.

Edited by StarSword on Dec 29th 2023 at 8:26:15 AM

^^ Sounds like Forced Creativity.

Edit: Not sure if there is sufficiently large ground left to cover for a trivia page Enforced Trope alongside existing tropes like Executive Meddling and Real Life Writes the Plot (+subtropes). A wick check would help to get more clarity on the subject.

Edited by eroock on Dec 29th 2023 at 3:44:33 PM

...Which is NRLEP, so it can't be used there.

Ok so, what would have happened if the author of Booty Royale: Never Go Down Without a Fight! hadn't left that note? Would Never Bring A Knife To A Fistfight still be enforced or just played straight?

If the citation is what makes the example meaningful, then that should be trivia.

Edited by SoyValdo7 on Dec 29th 2023 at 7:46:05 AM

What we're proposing here is a pretty broad restructuring. If we're changing all that, would changing the NRLEP status of one page be off the table?

I mean, I'm biased. I launched that trope; I'm the one who designated it NRLEP, specifically because I didn't want examples of writers complaining about why they wrote their works. So, personally, I'd have hard disagree on making it allow Real Life examples, since I just have a bad feeling about what will end up on the page.

More like the citation is proof that the use of the trope was intentional on the part of the author—in this case as a way of backing himself out after he wrote himself into a corner—rather than just something they just threw in while writing stream-of-consciousness/in the zone/however you want to put it.

That's the problem, you need proof that the author did this. Without it, we would just think that the example was played straight, for no particular reason. Heck, it doesn't even serve as a template for other authors to use, as is the case with Inverted Trope, Justified Trope or Subverted Trope, because each case is unique and for the most part, impossible to replicate.

Enforced Trope has nothing to do with how a trope is used. It's trivia about how the work was done.

Edited by SoyValdo7 on Dec 29th 2023 at 9:30:59 AM

I rarely use the playing with a trope types beyond subverted or invoked, but I had assumed Enforced Trope was when the narrative conspires to ensure that a trope happens. So the idea using Just in Time is Invoked Trope is when a character decides that would be a dramatic choice, while Enforced Trope is when the mechanics of a bomb are narratively designed in a way where that is the best option (such as Mission: Impossible – Fallout).

As it is currently defined it seems less like a playing with a trope type and more that some tropes have an external reasoning for being used, which is speculative on the part of the troper.

Edited by EmeraldSource on Dec 29th 2023 at 9:00:29 AM

Just as a side note, this is one of those pages where somewhere in the transition to the modern discussion system, what is now the archived discussion got blanked, losing a link to the original YKTTW that didn't get transferred to the modern system and had to be fished out of the Internet Archive. There's some discussion of redundancy there, but it and most of the other Playing with a Trope pages date to significantly before the wiki nailed down the definition of a trope and drew the Trivia and YMMV distinctions.

I would call this a Justified Trope.

For the record: I don't see the big deal with removing the NRLEP restriction from Forced Creativity. After all, such cases could already exist under Executive Meddling or Enforced Trope (with its current definition from Trope Tropes) and they did not end up as cesspools.

Edited by eroock on Dec 30th 2023 at 12:40:41 PM

Yeah, basically, Justified Trope is where there's a specific In-Universe explanation for the use of a trope, c.f. the thing I just wrote on PlayingWith.Franken Vehicle where Bob is a car tuner who builds drag-racing cars and is trying to get the best performance he can, regardless of whether he matches up the manufacturers.

I can certainly see the argument that Enforced Trope is more Trivia than trope. I'm more or less fine with dropping it as a variation of Playing with a Trope altogether; I guess the real question is whether we should continue to include it in-line in examples (i.e. "Bob did x trope. Enforced because writer was dealing with y OOC thing."), or if we need to rework it across the wiki.