All The Tropes Wiki Project

[Sofaspud]

Bob Schroeck wrote:

 It's not opaque once you know the language the writers themselves use.

Which is a point that I helped drive into a semi-policy at TVT and I hope becomes explicit policy at ATT:  if writers or editors or other creative folks already have a name for it, we use that name; we don't make up one we like better because we don't understand theirs.  Part of the point of an article is creating that understanding, after all.

As someone who hasn't been involved in trope discussions -- as J. Random Casual Visitor, in other words -- I believe that as currently implemented, the goal of creating understanding is not being met.

Or perhaps better put: you're only meeting that goal for people who have a prior commitment (personal or otherwise) to digging into your references to de-mystify them.  Others -- folks like myself, for example -- aren't 'hooked' enough by these sorts of titles and don't feel like burrowing through them to find out what they actually refer to.  Sure, I can read the article and thereby in theory gain understanding.  But if the trope name itself doesn't make any sense to me, there's no connection to be formed there and I'm not going to use it.  Yes, I know what Tomato In The Mirror means.  It did not and does not gain mindshare with me in the same way that, for example, Deus Ex Nukina or Artificial Stupidity do.  When I think of a TITM situation, the first thing that comes to mind is not that trope -- because I don't have the emotional attachment to the source material and the name is sufficiently opaque as to not associate itself with that situation in my mind.  The two I listed (and many more!) say what they mean; they are clear and self-evident.

That said, I'm all for including the names of well-established tropes.  If the Tomato Surprise has been around since the 70s, I'm not about to try and change it; I believe you when you say it's industry-standard, so to speak.  But it still doesn't speak to me, and personally, I'd prefer to be more inclusive and less clique-ish.  My suggestion would be to index it by another name as well -- a pointer, in programming terms; I'm not sure what a wiki calls it.  Redirect, maybe?

You said yourself "once you know the language the writers themselves use".  I'm suggesting that we help people get there rather than hiding it behind a in-joke wall.

EDIT: Perhaps it'll help clarify what I mean if I point out that, in looking through a list of tropes, nothing about Tomato In The Mirror or similarly-named tropes would leap out at me to even tell me that it applies to the situation for which I am searching.  That's what I mean by hiding.  Unless you know what it means, you won't know what it means.  I think that's bad.

--sofaspud
--"Listening to your kid is the audio equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting, Spud." --OpMegs