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All The Tropes:Trope Namer Syndrome: Difference between revisions
All The Tropes:Trope Namer Syndrome (view source)
Revision as of 16:38, 24 February 2021
, 3 years agoreplaced the TVT-specific symptom with the equivalent ATT-specific symptom; added the symptom "named after a character"
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(replaced the TVT-specific symptom with the equivalent ATT-specific symptom; added the symptom "named after a character") |
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{{Useful Notes}}
We were thinking of naming this page "The Adam Effect".<ref>However, not everybody remembers [[The Bible]] - specifically the Book of Genesis, where Adam was given the task of naming everything.</ref>
Sometimes editors place a little ''too'' much importance on creating a new trope Name.
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Make no mistake: We're perfectly happy to coin terms for literary phenomena when it's clear no one else has done it for us already. We have quite a few [[Trope Namers]] spread across the wiki and, frankly, these witty pop-culture references are one of our unique attractions.
But due to the size and popularity that the wiki has grown to, the old days of sitting around in closely-knit circles of nerds and naming tropes directly from our favorite works of fiction [[Gone Horribly Right|are Over]]. With [[Deader Than Disco|
So, naming tropes after characters or examples in fiction is a thing to avoid. There are occasional exceptions where a good new trope name can be created, but this is [[Sturgeon's Law|very rare]] and ''extremely'' difficult to do, as there are very few universally-known works or characters out there and chances are people don't remember them for the same reasons that we do. It's easy to mistake something that ''you'' know and love for something ''everyone'' knows and
'''Trope Namer Syndrome''' primarily manifests itself in the Trope Workshop where we pound out names and descriptions for new trope articles. It's easy to spot the occasional trope (er, proto-trope) where the editor is trying a little too hard to create a trope name, at the expense of developing a good name and definition that everyone will "get". These tend to get immediate responses of "[[Needs a Better Title]]" and/or "[[Needs a Better Description]]", and may also be criticized as "Bad Trope Namer".
There's a wide range of symptoms to Trope Namer
* A general insistence that some work of fiction [[Fan Myopia|"deserves to be"]] a [[Trope Namer]];
* A title that conveys ''only'' its connection to some [[Trope Namer]]
* A title that's just a character name with "The" tacked in front of it. Characters that are sufficiently well-known that people might understand the reference simply from the character name usually end up getting their own pages, such as The [[Red Baron|Red Baron]]. Character who aren't that famous will leave people asking "which one?", such as [[The Cedric]].
* A page image (and/or page quote) that conveys "[[Just a Face and a Caption|this is the Trope Namer]]" without properly illustrating the underlying definition;
* Listing the trope-naming example before the actual definition, or ([[
* Less than [[Three Rules of Three|three examples]] beyond "The [[Trope Namer]] is [X]..." (which goes double if the trope-naming example [[Zero Context Example|doesn't even explain itself]] or [[This Index Is Not an Example|isn't actually an example]] of its own trope);
* Being in a hurry to get the trope launched
Fortunately all of these symptoms are curable before launch, just take a moment to listen to suggestions from your fellow tropers, especially if you see several people agreeing on the same point (regardless of whether you agree with said point or not).
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