I'm really not trying to be obtuse, or abbrasively argumentative here, but the phrase "that's like saying Live Action TV and Live Action Film are the same thing" seems silly. Because TV and Film are different.
I'm saying that splitting Animation up the way it has been seems to me to be unnecessarily complicated. Animation is animation, whether it be long form or short. (Not to mention the entire "country of origin" nonsense.
Why use fifteen categories when seven will do, is my question. Use "Film" to mean live action film. Use "Animation" to mean anything that has been animated. And so on. The way this wiki does it seems very counterintuitive, as if it was purposefully designed to be as (and again, I don't mean any insult here) as pedantically, hairsplittingly, anal-retentatively complicated as possible.
Being in a Japanese-produced work is not enough of a difference to warrant its own trope.
Do you not see that you just contradicted yourself in just this post alone? First you say that it's silly to even bring up that television and film are different because television and film are different. But then you end the post by saying that as long as it's animated, television and film are not different and thus should not be separated as such.
The fact of the matter is that animated films are not just "long cartoons". They are films that are animated. They follow the same format and conventions as most live action films, and actually have very little in common with their television counterparts in terms of style, form, and content. Thus it would make more sense to group them with their film brethren than with their animated television cousins.
There is nothing counterintuitive about treating films as films and television shows as television shows.
Fine, I'm happy with that too. All Film = Film works just as well as "All Cartoons = Cartoons" to me. Breaking "Film" up into "Films that are also cartoons" and "Films that star real live people" is what I was saying is too complicated.
I wasn't trying to get into a semantic argument. My point, once again, is to ask if it wouldn't be easier to just use eight standard categories that covered all basic forms of media regardless of how we label those categories, than fifteen or sixteen categories that hair-split everything into its own very, very, very specific niche category?
I mean, seriously... I've seen things on this wiki divided up into things like (and before someone gets nitpicky, I'm being exemplary here, not specific... and yes, I am exaggerating to make a point here) "Animation - Yugoslavian" and "Nigerian Techno-Hip-Hop" and "Movies that Only This Troper Has Seen".
Do we need to be that specific?
edited 27th Feb '11 8:00:01 AM by Worldmaker
Being in a Japanese-produced work is not enough of a difference to warrant its own trope.Films have conventions that TV and short subjects don't. Therefore we separate Film and TV.
Animation has conventions that Live Action doesn't. Therefore we separate Animated Films from Live Action Film, the same way we separate Western Animation (TV shows) from Live Action TV.
We didn't always separate animated Films form Western Animation, but that led to confusion in example sorting — on some trope pages, a full-length animated film like Disney's Beauty And The Beast was listed in Film while on others it was listed under Western Animation. It led to confusion and more than a few duplicated entries, because one person put it in one section, then later someone else came along, expecting to find it in the other section, didn't see it and added it.
To cut down on the confusion, we decided to separate Animated Film from Live Action Film and put all full-length animated works in Film - Animated. The job of moving all the misplaced examples simply hasn't been completed yet.
Okay. I can see the why of it. Or at least the "how we got where we are" of it. But still it leaves my question. Why not solidify the guidelines on what goes where and use the basic categories rather than using hyper-specificity to settle the problem.
I'll give you an example from a trope I was reading just seconds ago (Nintendo Hard). Some of the examples are categorized as "Roleplaying Game" examples, while others are categorized as "Roguelike Game" examples.
Roguelike games are Roleplaying Games... the split seems unnecessary to me. And this is only one example of what I mean.
edited 27th Feb '11 8:14:21 AM by Worldmaker
Being in a Japanese-produced work is not enough of a difference to warrant its own trope.Nintendo Hard is a special case, since it is completely video-game exclusive. On most trope pages, games are either Tabletop Games or Video Games. But using that categorization would simply dump all the examples on Nintendo Hard into one huge section, (there are no Tabletop examples; they're all Video Game examples.) it was divided by game type, into Roguelike, First-Person Shooter, Hack 'n' Slash, and so on. That's one of the few pages you'll find (quite possibly the only one) that's divided that way.
edited 27th Feb '11 9:05:15 AM by Madrugada
Yeah, splitting videogames by game type is something that's only supposed to happen on video-game specific tropes.
Similarly, Music Tropes will often split the examples by music genre (and I think a few pages go too far in splitting sub-genres), but we don't split music examples for general-media tropes.
Folders are a fantastic weapon against the dreaded Wall of Text. I don't really recall seeing any over-specific folders, aside from the forementioned music genres, and then only on the music-specific tropes. Maybe there could be fewer, I don't readily know concerning music. But while all Roguelikes are RP Gs, not all RP Gs are Roguelikes, they share some core mechanics but there is a world of difference between Baldur's Gate and similar games and Nethack and similar games.
Context is key. I've seen tropes that have folders for specific franchises because the trope is so widely used by it. It's good to keep a massive laundry list of Metal Gear Solid examples seperate from every other game that uses this trope examples.
If you think there are folders that are not needed, remove them and condense the examples under another folder. Multimedia tropes can go as broad as need be, "Film" and "Video Games". Media-specific can be as specific as examples permit, if we're talking RPG tropes having a seperate folder with a dozen examples each of Final Fantasy, Japanese, and Western works.
edited 1st Mar '11 1:24:44 AM by Rotpar
But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you.There's also a limit to how big a folder can be and still have the coding work. Which means don't just fold a large folder into another one without discussion. It may have been separated out so that the code doesn't break.
I'm not trying to be mean here', but it sort of sounds like you want only a few large categories and for those to be the only ones used. Because of the way tropes work, that plan doesn't.
Didn't we just have this conversation regarding Western Animation and Anime? The fact that you consider all animation to be the same doesn't make it right or logical. The fact that each of our categories applies tropes differently means we categorize them differently. The fact that there are people who like one classification but not the other means we categorize them differently. The fact nearly everybody else in the world categorizes them differently means we categorize them differently.
And, no, there is no advantage of standardization to a smaller number of folders. Less categorization means it's harder to find the series you are looking for, since you have to look through more. Less flexibility in our categorization means we can't handle when a category gets too big, whether from a software standpoint, or because of the above-mentioned lack of efficiency. We're stuck doing things one way that happens to be wrong for this particular situation.
It'd be like always driving 55 mph on a road, whether it's sunny, rainy, or a blizzard outside. They're all weather, but that doesn't mean we treat them the same.
Everyone Has An Important Job To DoI've dropped this, because apparently asking what seems to be common sense questions in a polite and reasonable manner somehow is taken as insult by certain persons, and I am loathe to be labelled as an instigator of trouble when all I was looking for was a satisfaction to my curiosity.
I still maintain "This is how we do it, just accept it" is no explanation at all, but there it is.
Sorry for rocking the boat. I'll stop asking questions now.
Being in a Japanese-produced work is not enough of a difference to warrant its own trope.Ahem. There's nothing wrong with asking these questions. But when the answers are given and fully explained, it's poor form to keep asking them over and over again, hoping to get a different answer.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Do feature-length animated film examples go under animation or under film? Because I've found them in both.
Being in a Japanese-produced work is not enough of a difference to warrant its own trope.