People are getting confused by the fact that we're using silly names for the category under discussion (the 4th level, the ought to be a subtrope level).
What's being said is that the examples in what is currently a You Fail or X Goof snowclone are very likely to be instances of either some existing trope or of some trope that hasn't been written up yet.
This means that You Fail and X Goof will ultimately be empty when all the examples are in their proper place and those titles can go away.
Works for me. It gets us back into the trope business and out of the nit picking business.
edited 18th Nov '10 1:05:31 PM by FastEddie
Goal: Clear, Concise and WittyNo, deboss. You snuck in while I was typing, and I forgot to edit to adjust the caret count.
edited 18th Nov '10 1:16:04 PM by Madrugada
I was making a reference to "are errors really tropes". Hollywood Science is essentially errors that are considered standard tools for building a story. I'll try and make a table.
| type | Real Science | Not Real Science | ||
| Accepted | Shown Their Work | Hollywood Science | ||
| Not Accepted | Reality Is Unrealistic | Proto Hollywood Science trope | ||
Fast Eddie, I'm saying that the only things in the fourth level should be Catch-all Pages for the not-yet-a-trope-because-they-are-not-yet-conventions type errors. Right now, those pages have three basic types of examples:
- Errors that are widely used, that are tropes themselves, but which haven't been named and given a page yet.
- Examples that should be on an existing page
- Errors that have only shown up a few times, that aren't tropes now and may or may not become a trope in the future. These are the ones I'm calling proto-tropes.
In the process of cleaning up the existing pages, we would
- Make pages for the examples in the first category
- Move the examples in the second category to the correct page
- Keep an eye on the examples in the third category to see if they ever develop into tropes or simply stay occasional examples.
For example, on You Fail Biology Forever, there are these four examples under Literature:
- Wayne Barlowe does a pretty good job of maintaining consistent and possible alien biologies in Expedition... except for the Daggerwrists. Pregnant Daggerwrists are cannibalistic and are executed by their tribes when their single offspring is born. If you can't do the math, this means that at least two Daggerwrists will die for every one born.
- Similarly to the above, in the Point Fantasy book Brog the Stoop, it's mentioned that a female "Stoop" (vaguely elven creatures with blue skin) can only bear one "Stoopling," which would mean every generation is half the size of the previous one, thus leading to extinction pretty quickly.
- Similar, again, is a Dutch book by A.F.Th. van der Heijden called Het Leven uit Een Dag. Humans only live one day in the book. They can only have sex once, then their reproductive organs will wither away (the woman will get pregnant instantly). Since the humans in that world only get one child, each generation will be half the size of the previous one. Since a new generation only takes a day to grow up and die, humankind would be extinct pretty darn soon.
- Likewise, the vampire-like creatures from George R.R. Martin's Fevre Dream seem doomed to slow extinction, as their females give birth to single offspring and always die as a result. Granted, Martin's vampires are actually aware of this quandary, but that can't explain why their young would evolve the self-destructive habit of clawing their way out of the womb, in the first place. At least the source is clear: that's what they thought about lions in ancient times - hence the Aesop's fable about a hog boasting to a lioness about the number of her babies, to which the lioness replies "I have one, but it's a Lion".
These are all four examples, not of a biology error, but of the existing trope Writers Cannot Do Math.
See, I would call that Impossible Arithmetic and leave out the insult to writers.
Goal: Clear, Concise and WittyI rewrote the Bad Writing index while we were doing this just as an example. It still needs some work, but it seems less angry now.
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
Diagonalizing The Matrix
Attributing this to mathematics is awfully general. Maybe Impossible Population Dynamics.
Pretentious quote || In-joke from fandom you've never heard of || Shameless self-promotion || Something weird you'll habituate to@ 311: Whatever we call it, it's already a trope and it already has a page. Those examples are examples of a trope that is already identified, named and collecting examples.
@313: And maybe there are enough examples of bad math specifically applied to population dynamics to warrant making a subtrope just for that. It very easily could be — "only allowed to breed once" is a detail that lots of writers seem to like.
edited 18th Nov '10 2:16:04 PM by Madrugada
Diagonalizing The Matrix
"The numbers don't add up" is pretty much "Writers are mistaken while sitting on chairs". Basically every kind of discrepancy with real life can be boiled down to some sort of numbers not adding up. Math is everywhere.
Yeah, maybe. I was saying if we're moving to an existing trope, we can probably find something more specific than Writers Cannot Do Math.
edited 18th Nov '10 2:18:56 PM by TripleElation
Pretentious quote || In-joke from fandom you've never heard of || Shameless self-promotion || Something weird you'll habituate toI apologize for the inadvertent derail into specific examples.
Regarding what to call the clumps of Level 3 tropes — I think that they don't really need to be subtropes of some sort of "error" supertrope. Just index them as Physics Tropes, or Medicine Tropes, or Law Tropes or whatever; the index doesn't need a name pointing out that most of them are unrealistic or erroneous when compared to Real Life.
edited 18th Nov '10 4:46:42 PM by Madrugada
Would a "spawn list" for Physics Goof on the page be worth while? So we can show people, yes you are supposed to take the ones you find to YKTTW and try to launch them.
Fight smart, not fair.I don't see a reason to list the Physics Goof Tropes separately from the Physics Tropes (apply that to any field that we have a Fail or Crying or Does Not Work That Way page for). Doing that still establishes a neener-neener-you-got-this-wrong — attitude? atmosphere? — to a degree.
edited 18th Nov '10 4:39:02 PM by Madrugada
Gnarly. Science Tropes->sub->Physics Tropes->sub->FTL Travel
The plurals above are pure indexes, That is, they contain a description of the organizing principle and a list of pages, no examples. We don't get examples until we're down at the FTL Travel level.
Physics Tropes, however, might hold some examples that are awaiting classification/incorporation into a sub-trope. A single folder for these should do it.
Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty^ Yessssss! Thank you for saying it so much more clearly than I was.
And even though FTL Travel is, by the current laws of the universe as we understand them, incompatible with reality, we aren't calling it an error.
Plus we can go as many index/supertrope levels deep as we need to. Science Tropes->Physics Tropes->Space Tropes->FTL Travel, Spaceships Have Windshields, No Kind Of Atmosphere, Batman Can Breathe in Space, Space Plane, Old-School Dogfighting, et cetera, et, cetera, ad infinitum.
edited 18th Nov '10 4:45:32 PM by Madrugada
Well, we need to keep an eye on hierarchy depth. For example, Space Tropes would be at the same level as Physics Tropes uhm, meaning that FTL Travel could be "in" both. **
edited 18th Nov '10 4:50:43 PM by FastEddie
Goal: Clear, Concise and WittyTrue. Space Tropes would also have some tropes indexed on it that are also indexed on Biology Tropes, Chemistry Tropes, and Math Tropes.
edited 18th Nov '10 4:56:14 PM by Madrugada
So are we doing away with the prototrope catching ground, then, if we're going to pure indices?
Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.
Crown Description:

But is this really anything other than hate-laced pedantry? Is bad science or whatever really a trope?
Grr. Argh.