Topic on Forum:Trope Talk

The Dragon as the name of a trope is an ancient relic dating to the earliest past of TV Tropes, a time when trope names didn't need to make sense. It's a terrible name that people only remember because of its common occurrence and egregious lack of sense. I happen to know that the trope was originally named by some random person after a work of fiction where the Dragon was a dragon. The other explanations are Retcons. In particular, drawing from Campbell is a post-hoc justification, and doesn't refer to the same trope anyway as far as I can determine.

I looked throught the examples, and it looks like only about 1% -- under 2% at most -- of the listed Dragons are actual dragons. Some of these mentions are misuses of the trope, as people scramble for find dragons that could through some twist of logic actually be called Dragons (and not just because Tolkien liked to capitalize the word). There are also many mentions about things like how the work has a dragon who nevertheless isn't The Dragon or how The Dragon isn't a dragon but instead has a sword called The Dragon. There are also several examples of a situation where a non-Dragon dragon is the Big Bad and has a non-dragon Dragon.

I know fixing all this widespread nonsense is a huge effort, but I think it should be done. It's really not too different from replacing the old, non-standard titles for trope listings and putting those tropelist templates everywhere. I have a lot of free time at the moment and can work during the hours when the site doesn't tend to choke on gateway timeouts.

With The Dragon there is also the issue that two related things are conflated: the Top Enforcer and the Special Pet of Doom, as they could be called. It's the difference between Sauron and Gaurhoth in Tolkien's Beren and Lúthien in The Silmarillion. Sauron is a mighty sorcerer in command of his own fortress that guards one approach to Angband. Gaurhoth is a terrifying super wolf, whom Morgoth raised personally and later chained to guard the gates of Angband, but Gaurhoth still doesn't show itself to be more intelligent than an animal and is in charge of nothing. I would also call the literal dragon Wong Bongerok from The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth an example of the Special Pet of Doom. Even though Wong Bongerok is intelligent, its master still treats it as a pet and Wong Bongerok is fine with that, apparently because of its non-human mindset. In video games there is also a difference between how you may meet the Big Bad's Top Enforcer in the game, doing plot-relevant things like ambushing you and appearing as a Climax Boss in connection to some big revelation, while the Special Pet of Doom would just be some non-human (or non-Elven, etc.) beastie that you need to fight through just before you get to the final boss.

I think splitting the trope though is not nearly as much a priority as changing The Dragon to something else, which I think should be Top Enforcer, given how that seems to be by far the more common form.

The same sort of name change would of course go for the other tropes with names based on The Dragon, so that for example Co-Dragons would become Co-Enforcers or something. Noble Top Enforcer at least already exists, so that one won't need any changing.

You are right, of course.

The Enforcer is already taken it seems... though not in an important enough way we couldn't steal it.

Of course he's right, but a lot of this seems like it's along the lines of "you can't use language this way" which is a very good set-up for a failing argument. It is not the best name, but it's well known to pretty much all of our users and I can only assume it's one of the Tropes of Legend. Of course, "because everyone does it" is also an argument with lesser merit.

If we do replace it, it needs to be very short -- 2 words tops. I think we really need the perfect name if we're going to change. The "The" form might be preferred, for parallelism with the other bands of five members. "Top Henchman", "Head Enforcer", The Enforcer ... any other ideas?

My suggestion was "Top Enforcer". The term already plays a distinguished part in the trope description, the first sentence of which goes, "The Dragon is the Big Bad's top enforcer." There is also the Noble Top Enforcer trope, which can only have been named that way because people didn't want to perpetuate the Dragon silliness and name the trope as "Noble Dragon".

There are however some Dragon tropes that use the word, and I think they also should be changed. For example:

• Co-Dragons - "Co-Enforcers"
• Demoted to Dragon - "Demoted to Second"
• Devour the Dragon - "Eat the Enforcer"
• Dragon Ascendant - (need to think about this one)
• Dragon-in-Chief - "Enforcer with the Force"
• Dragon Their Feet - "Tardy Top Enforcer"
• Dragon with an Agenda - "Enforcer with Ideas"

(Incidentally the list on The Dragon page also has The Starscream, which is a trope named after a character and should be changed too to something more sensible.)

As for the parallelism with the Five-Bad Band members, I don't think that's important at all. But anyway, if you look at the individual pages you can see that most of the old names with the definite articles have been turned into redirects. The Five-Bad Band members now feature the Big Bad, the Evil Genius, and the Dark Chick. Only The Brute still retains its unnecessary definite article (unnecessary, that is, because this site uses Mediawiki instead of pmwiki).

And here I thought TV Tropes was bad with giving tropes stale and unimaginative names.

Do you have any better ideas? I think the most important thing for a trope name to do is to describe the contents. Having impenetrable jargon is bad enough, but The Dragon is like naming an apple farmer a "Unicorn".

Society to Prevent Overly Original Names member.

I'm for keeping it. The article explains the term, so anyone who is confused as to "What the hell is a dragon in this context supposed to mean?" can find out why it's called that.

And I like that pretentious little label you added to your last post. Do you live your everyday life with a stick wedged up your anus?

Noxious, if you think trope names don't matter, perhaps we should quit with all that lengthy alphabet stuff and just give the tropes numbers: 1, 2 3, and so on. Or if those are too hard to remember, maybe we could shortcut the decision making process by naming all the tropes with random dictionary words. Everyone can just check the trope pages to understand what the tropes mean, right?

Like this:

• Absorb: Fred and Bob.
• Choirloft: Alice gets a new job, but quits it on the same day.
• Clinic: The bear
• Commodore: Fred's parents.
• Flight: Bob and Alice, after Erase.
• Fluent: David dies in a car crash implied to have been caused by the tiki statue.
• Materfamilias: Bob and Caroline's trek to the Andes doesn't quite go as expected.
• Maximal: Alice turns out to be Bob's half-sister.
• Ow: Alice's Christmas presents.
• Regale: In the end, Bob gets rejected by Caroline.
• Set: David's tiki statue turns out to have supernatural qualities.
• Tangerine: Bob.
• Zori: Bob's car.

And userboxes are pretentious now? I actually think they're pretty frivolous, but I wanted to express my philosophy in a concise way. (Did you notice what the acronym is?)

I think the difference is not just that the meaning is unclear from the title, it's that the meaning is actively misleading. We have plenty of tropes whose names are just unclear, either because not everyone gets the reference (Xanatos Gambit) or because people don't always know even real-world terms (would someone who hasn't heard of the Uncanny Valley be able to figure it out from the title?), but they aren't *misleading*.

How about using "Lieutenant" somewhere in the name? English vernacular already has it mean a second in command that does the the dirty work (particularly common in discussing criminal organizations).