Does separating animated works from live-action works reinforce the Animation Age Ghetto?

Something that I’ve noticed ever since I started using this website is that the folders for tropes often separate live-action works from animated works such as films and shows. I have doubts over this because it might reinforce the Animation Age Ghetto by separating the works and thus not having the animated works be of the same caliber as the live-action works, thus treating the mediums as “different.” I want to know what others think of this and if it is a good idea or not.

They are different becuase they are different Media. One is created with camera footage, other is by a drawing tools. There are inherent differences in production, capabilities, and presentation.

I fail to see relation to Animation Age Ghetto, which is a belief animation is for children. There's no way this belief can appear by examples being grouped by Media Categories.

Well, I see some pages like Fridge Horror where there is no split in which the tropers are confused whether or not to put animated films in “Film” or “Western Animation.” I see why the split exists. Sorry, I am new to this website, and I am a bit confused over the folders.

Edited by Gamerknowitall on Mar 5th 2024 at 1:14:20 AM

Also, the reason why I thought it would reinforce the ghetto is that I thought that by separating them, it would make people view animation as “inferior” to live-action films. I now know that there is a bigger reason for the split.

Western Animation being separate from live-action media is more a result of the Animation Age Ghetto than a cause. In practice and for historical reasons, our media categories effectively group works more by audience and fanbase than by actual medium, which is why "anime and manga", a distinction based on nationality, covers two mediums. The animated categories don't necessarily exclusively cover kids' works, but for the most part, the people that will consume non-kids animated works are a subset of those that will consume non-kids works more generally. So fans of animated shows on the wiki will typically be fans of other animated shows, fans of Japanese works will be fans of other Japanese works, etc. Or at least, the people looking for examples of each type of work will be looking for other examples that we put in the same category.

All western animated works, whether film or TV, go in the Western Animation namespace. I believe in the earliest days of the folder (or at least, medium heading) system, they all went into the Western Animation folder as well, but because the Live-Action TV folder specifies "live-action" and the Film folder doesn't, people were confused which folder to put animated films into, which led to the splitting of the Film folder into "Film-Live Action" and "Film-Animated". (Live-Action TV goes into the Series/ namespace, the only medium namespace that doesn't match a folder in any way, because, well, we used to be all about TV tropes so most of the work pages we had were live-action TV, and they used to all be in Main unless they conflicted with a trope name, so Series/ used to be more of a disambiguator than a descriptor.) Compared to animated films, animated shows tend to be more likely to be either purely comedic, not for kids (or at least written with adults more in mind), or both, so there is some reason for people looking for examples of one to not necessarily be looking for the other.

Edited by MorganWick on Mar 5th 2024 at 11:56:21 AM

In the early EARLY days of the site there was no media categories; works, tropes and other pages were all together. But once a trope reached more than ten examples it became prudent to figure out some catalog methodology. Namespaces alleviate many issues, otherwise we are looking at infinitely more duplicates of Similarly Named Works having to specifying the movie, video game or comic book in the title.

The system is about as best as can be managed, as some tropes are prudent to categorize by things like creators, genre or platform rather than medium/format.

Okay, thank you both for the information! I didn’t know that.

Edited by Gamerknowitall on Mar 6th 2024 at 7:30:22 AM