She also displays a great deal of athletic agility prior to that, when she was checking the cause of the one villager's leaking roof and climbed down in a way that would make parkour artists either proud or jealous.
The issue of Te Ka's gender has come again. I noticed it when RandomTroper123 changed all references of Te Ka from a demon to a demoness.
I initially changed it back to conform to how Te Ka is presented in the story as a "demon of earth and fire". Traditionally "demon" has been a gender neutral with the concept of a "demoness" being a more modern invention.
However, in looking of the examples, I see that female pronouns abound when describing Te Ka when it should be either "he" or "it".
In many Mythological stories, when a god, goddess, demi-god, or other supernatural entity becomes corrupted, their new form represents an entirely new identity.
Te Ka is a new being, not just Te Fiti in desperate need of a some moisturizer. This new being is defined "in-universe" as a demon of earth and fire.
The question is, do we want to honor that identify and cleanup the female pronouns whenever Te Ka is being described? Or not worry about, and just leave it the mess as it currently is because the page is unmarked spoilers anyway?
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Personally, I wouldn't worry about it since this page is spoilers off.
I'd say depicting a mythical creature that's traditionally harmless as a threatening monster counts as "adaptational villainy"
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Are you referring to the Kakamora which already have an "Adaptational Villainy" entry that's not been contested. If so, are you just basically giving a "thumbs up" to the use of that trope?
Otherwise, can you provide more details? What mythical creature are we considering here?
Edited by rva98014
The page says Te Kā is ambiguously gendered and only referred to as "demon" or "it", however she is explicitly referred to as female near the end, when Vaiana says "let her come to me".
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Re: the "Ambiguous Gender" entry: well that's weird, and doesn't seem to apply and I'd propose to delete it. After all, Te Ka is just the "corrupted" form of Te Fiti but why on earth would her gender change just because her heart was stolen.
As for her character description of "A demon made of fire and lava, and an ancient foe to Maui.", well that seems all right; "a demon" is gender neutral right.
A random reader of random things
I don't believe Moana's skirt should be described as "high-waisted" under Bare Your Midriff. Most modern pants are actually low-waisted, making her skirt seem high in comparison. As a seamstress, a good rule of thumb for finding a person's natural waistline is "Where do your hands go if you put your hands on your hips?" And if you look at Moana's picture, which luckily has the right pose... her skirt is level with her hands. It's sitting at her natural waistline. Now, if it were a couple inches higher, then yes I would call that high-waisted. But as it is? That is not a high-waisted skirt. And I don't want to just edit it because someone else will probably not get why and change it back.
Edit for typo
Edited by RandomReader Hide / Show Replies
Your comments are well thought out and support the removal of the qualifier "high-waisted". It also calls into play that the example is more of a Downplayed Example because while some midriff skin is shown, the navel is not exposed which does seem to be expected from this trope.
Basically we can update the example and refer back to this discussion as the edit reason. How would you feel about changing the example text to:
- Bare Your Midriff: A Downplayed Example. She shows some skin between her top and her skirt, but the skirt, set at her natural waistline, covers her navel.
I think that edit would be satisfactory.
Sorry for taking so long to answer. I don't browse this part of TV Tropes regularly.
Te Ka has the trope Gaia's Vengeance associated with her. This raises in interesting question. Is the darkness threatening Moana's home island the result of Te Ka cursing the world, spreading blight and unleashing monsters? Or is it the case that now that the Heart of Creation has been removed from Te Fiti's control, everything she made with it is now in the process of becoming "unmade" including Te Fiti's goddess form and the barriers that were keeping the monsters at bay. It's a subtle point, but the first case is an active curse and Gaia's Vengeance is appropriate. The other case is a state of advanced entropy at work and Gaia's Vengeance is not fitting.
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The legends state that the corruption is the result of Te Ka cursing the world, but whether this is truly the case or not isn't explicitly stated in the film.
I just rewatched Gramma Tala's opening tale about the legend of the Te Fiti and realized that she never says the darkness was a result of Te Ka cursing the world.
She says " But without her heart, Te Fiti began to crumble, giving birth to a terrible darkness". Then later, as Maui was trying to escape, she says he was "confronted by another who sought the heart. Te Ka! A demon of earth and fire", implying Te Ka was a different entity than Te Fiti and only a monster, not a goddess capable of cursing the entire world.
The legend concludes saying that Te Ka, along with the other demons of the deep, are still seeking the heart, hiding in the darkness that continues to spread. It never says Te Ka or the demons caused the darkness, only that they were taking advantage of it.
This tends to support the interpretation that with the heart being lost, everything Te Fiti created is now becoming unmade in a spreading darkness and thus there is no focused "vengeance" going on.
Unless someone has a strong rebuttal either from the film or some other Word of God source, it seems that Gaia's Vengeance despite appearing to be appropriate, is actually not justified by what's presented in the movie.
EDIT: Also re-read the trope definition and it focuses on karmic retribution based upon the actions of humanity. In this story, humans had nothing to do with the event that upset the balance of nature. That was totally Maui's doing and as a result, humans were suffering the effects.
Edited by rva98014
Well, Maui is half-human.
Does the trope require that the damage was done by humanity collectively, or can it be one man?
The trope tends to focus on a human or humanity disrespecting nature and nature responds with vengeance as a form of karmic retribution. The film establishes that Maui wanted to steal the Heart of Creation intending to give it to humanity as a gift. Then everything went pear-shaped when the mother island began collapsing and Te Fiti transformed into Te Ka.
I suppose you could make a case for Gaia's Vengeance but it really seems like Te Ka is too mindless and rage filled to be actively cursing the world and it's more a case of reality slowly unraveling over 1000 years and finally reaching Moana's home.
Edited by rva98014
The page carries the warning " Beware of unmarked spoilers!" Does this mean it's the consensus of the editors of this area that examples do not require spoiler tags? If so there are many examples that can have their tags removed.
EDIT: I think this page should be spoiler tag free as there are some tropes that give away spoilers just by their title and being in a specific character's section. For example, Tala's section contains Resurrective Immortality and Our Ghosts Are Different. Regardless of how the details of the example are shielded, the trope itself pretty much gives away that Tala dies. It would be easier to discuss examples without having to hide segments (or worse, the entire example) behind spoiler tags.
Edited by rva98014 Hide / Show Replies
I agree with this. Since it doesn't seem like this page has anyone invested in it enough to watch the discussion page, I doubt it would step on any toes to just go ahead and purge it. If it says "Beware of unmarked spoilers!" at the top of the page, that should be enough.
Edited by BURGINABC
Yup, posted my question back in March and you're the first person to reply. I'm game with starting to casually remove the various spoiler tags. I'll adjust the "beware" message to all caps to make it stand out a bit. Otherwise, help yourself.
Edited by rva98014
Done.
I really didn't want to remove all the spoilers manually, so I thought I'd try my hand at writing a Python script to do it for me.
Since I didn't have much experience with Regular Expressions, it might have taken me longer to write this script than it would have taken to do the job manually. But on the plus side, it was a less boring method, and the script ought to be reusable, so if I ever need to despoiler another page it will be nearly effortless.
The script can be found here
if you're interested, but if you ever decide to use it, make sure to check that the output is correct before pasting it back into the site. I think I've got all the bugs worked out, but it's possible that testing it with a different article might expose new issues.
Oh dang. It must not have worked quite as well as I thought it did. :-/
Well thanks for cleaning it up...
Edited by BURGINABC
Np for the record it seemed to fail when the spoiler tag was on the last line of the example.... Maybe a cr or lf was throwing it off?
I don't think it has to do with line break characters.
The problem I kept running into, and thought I'd finally solved but apparently hadn't, is that it's hard to tell whether a "]]" belongs to a spoiler tag, or to something else.
The part where I tried to evacuate all the other bracketed expressions into the list, then put them back after stripping the spoiler tags, was supposed to bypass this. It apparently didn't work perfectly, even though the results were better than previous attempts, and good enough that I didn't notice anything wrong until you started posting corrections. Still, that was clearly not the way to solve that problem...
What's really needed is a reliable way to ignore a "]]" whenever it has a corresponding "[[" between it and the "[[spoiler:", while otherwise matching the "[[spoiler:" to the nearest "]]".
I think there'd probably be a simple way to achieve this if I was better at writing Regular Expressions.
Although I could be wrong about that; for all I know it may actually not be possible to do this with pattern matching alone, but only with an actual parser that maps the syntax into a tree.
Heh, if text processing were as easy as it looked, then the Scunthorpe Problem wouldn't exist...
Anyway, sorry I didn't check more closely before pasting the results back into the site. I thought I'd gotten it working correctly, but I guess I didn't check closely enough.
Edited by BURGINABC
Meant to post this here, rather than on the main discussion page.
Re. Tamatoa's species:
Andrew Chesworth, one of the artists who designed Tamatoa, says that he's a "Kong-sized coconut crab", which is supported by his fourth pair of legs having little pincers - something decorator crabs don't have but coconut crabs do - at least according to Wikipedia. In regards to him decorating his shell, Tamatoa didn't start doing so until after his rivalry with Maui started, so he doesn't really resemble either species.
There's a recent addition to Moana's character section that I don't feel is appropriate to her.
This is not an accurate portrayal of Moana. The Cute Clumsy Girl trope is about a cute, endearing female character who is a perpetual klutz and her clumsiness is a defining aspect of her character.
It's not about a character being clumsy in a new environment as Moana initially appears on board her Catamaran since she never developed "sea-legs" but to which she adapts over time.
It's not about a human being initially transfixed by a trickster demi-god who was fully intending on pulling a fast one on Moana. That played out once but Moana, now wise to his tricks, doesn't fall for it again.
It's not about human entering the land of monsters and being a "bit clumsy" in a new environment where everything is trying to kill you.
It's not about being treated like a rag-doll by a gigantic, psychopathic murder crab that's clearly a hundred times stronger than you.
It's not about ignoring the incredibly graceful way that Moana storms the main Kakamora ship to retrieve Hei Hei where she deftly dodges blow-darts, vaults over the top of the leader's tower to grab the chicken, then escapes by jumping onto their giant drum and, while in mid-air, throws a spear with a rope attached with such accuracy and force that is sticks into the mast of Maui's boat so she can zip-line down to safety. That is not the action of a Cute Clumsy Girl.
Moana is on a hero's journey and she encounters her fair share of prat-falls, slip-ups, or awkward moves that's clearly played for laughs and meant to show her going from inexperienced to experienced.
However, the core of her character is that of a competent, coordinated, athletic teenage girl not a Cute Clumsy Girl.
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