Discussion Main / AnAxeToGrind

Please bump it. If confirmed, it needs to be de-wicked before it will be cut.

Bump complete. I'll get back to you in another two years.

That doesn't mean that you should just send it to the cutlist; you could've at least sent it to TRS for review.

The fact that a particular person uses an axe says something about the person using it. And if this is People Sit On Chairs, so are at least 10% of the Weapons and Wielding Tropes— the ones about exactly which weapon is being wielded.

Great Limmick, you say that as though there being a lot of them somehow means they are tropes. An arbitrary number of similar pages existing doesn't make this a trope, it just means there are a lot of sitting-on-chairs entries out there. The trope-like elements this page does offer could very easily be included on the pages of the actual tropes referenced (such as Bruisers favoring axes).

What kind of bruisers, though? Boisterous, Lightning, or Cute? Then there's the Mighty Glacier, Glacier Waif, Big Guy, Pintsized Powerhouse, and Super-Strong Child. And the fact that a lot of these people eschew axes entirely, relying on a BFS, a Blade On A Stick, or Good Old Fisticuffs, or prefer to Drop The Hammer or Carry a Big Stick.

If you think we should drop Weapon Of Choice and its subtropes plus a few other Weapons and Wielding Tropes besides that because People Fight With Weapons, that's fine. I just wanted to be sure that's what you wanted.

If that's the case, then why don't we get rid of all those weapon categories, because the only message is that sometimes people wield oversized swords, pole arms, their bare hands, hammers, or staves? (I'm being sarcastic here). A lot of the tropes on this website could be removed for that very reason.

Sarcasm? That kinda sounds like the thrust of a lot of those entries. There being a lot of them doesn't make them tropes. All right, to be fair, this entry DOES go a little into who uses axes. Which is a bit more specific than "people". We see dwarves cited as typical axe users. So that is a cliche we see this playing into. But isn't the trope the cliche itself, not just the component? "Dwarves use axes" is a trope, but it doesn't mean "axes" are a trope any more than "Stereotypical drag queens wear dresses" makes dresses themselves a trope. "Construction crew workers aimlessly using jackhammers to some vague purpose" is a trope (and for that matter, so are vague purposes). I'm not convinced "jackhammers" are a trope. The problem, I think, is that this entry isn't "tropes about axes". It's just "axes". I know I conceded initially it goes a bit into who uses them, which helps, but we could go a bit into who sits in chairs too. We get the example of the Big Guy using axes. Doesn't that just mean axes are part of the Big Guy trope?

Let me put it another way. Can someone explain to me how "Using an axe as a weapon" is more of a trope than "Using a chair as something to sit on"? Is there something that makes this substantially more than that? I may well just be comprehending it in the wrong light. My question's not just rhetorical.

I should add, I have no problem with Weapon Of Choice, as that looks at the trope of weapons being matched to character concepts/archetypes, which is most manifestly a trope. Some of the individual weapon pages, though...

"An axe appears in this work" is not a trope any more than "this character has blue eyes." The eye color tropes are all being heavily reworked in TRS, and I think all of these "weapon type X exists in this work" need the same treatment. If the weapon is associated more often with a particular type of character (all elves are archers, all dwarves have axes) or personality, that's a trope. Otherwise, it's just an exhaustive catalog of every axe (or sword, or spear, or knife) in all of fiction.