Making an index of Western Animation tropes

We've already got an index for Anime Tropes, and one for Animated Tropes in general, so why not one for tropes that primarily appear in Western Animation? Off the top of my head, Anvil on Head and Accordion Man aren't likely to appear in Japanese works.

YKTTW it?

Because the list is meant to be for tropes that are specific to the medium- that are things of animation in and of itself. This isn't how all the lists are but the clearing out of the lists is a long and drawn out process that involves moving things to pages to genre pages.

Western Animation doesn't really have tropes, hell Anime Tropes shouldn't really exist but it does so we're stuck with it until I can be bothered to attack that one with any energy. Some shows and some genres should have tropes. We're making lists for those.

edit: in fact yeah, that's a special effort- moving everything by myself is like a wonky train-long, hard and easily derailed.

edited 13th Apr '11 4:37:37 PM by SomeSortOfTroper

I actually think there is some value in Anime Tropes, but under a different name - it's the only significant list of non-Western media tropes we have. I think most of these tropes could apply to Japanese works in other mediums as well, but they don't really fit in with what we're trying to have on pages like Literature Tropes and the like.

It's not a priority now, but one day I'd like to see us change it to something more like Japanese Media Tropes.

Edit: Literature Tropes doesn't exist? Huh?

edited 13th Apr '11 7:14:30 PM by nrjxll

I think there is Text Tropes.

Here's a problem with Anime Tropes:

There are Japanese Cultural Tropes, as I like to call them, which are tropes that were formed and propagate in Japan. Tropes that appear in a culture can appear elsewhere in a case of parallel evolution, such is the nature of culture and of any trope, but we know that tropes get codified and made uniform as they propagate and so the culture has an effect. This has nothing to do with anime and they can have Manga examples, Anime examples or Live Action TV or Film examples.

There are Anime And Manga Tropes or Japanese Graphical Tropes- ok, now the trope is something that can only happen in a drawing but that can happen in Anime or Manga. Like the trope about the big inflating heads.

Stuff that is actually going to be naturally tied into Anime and Anime alone is probably just the stuff dealing with being adapted from Manga and there's probably not that much of it.

I dont know Anime Tropes right now is tropes that appear most often or are stock tropes used in Animes. As in these are the "go to tropes" for Anime (and Manga)

Along with

• Anime Character Types
• Anime Settings
• Anime Genres

We have Comic Book Tropes which does the same as most are stock tropes for comics and are hardly medium specific. IE Talking Is a Free Action, Fun Personified, Full Bleed.

(Full Bleed is an actual manufacturer trope that does apply to manga as well.)

edited 14th Apr '11 3:14:46 AM by Raso

^ Not it's not. I went through and cleared out Comic Book Tropes, made Superhero Tropes its own index, made Legacy Tropes. If something ended up wrong there's probaly just some human issue with it. For instance, Talking Is a Free Action is a comic boook trope with badly placed film examples as I see it. Not knowing how long things last is different from a comic book frame being the fundamental unit of time, reality be damned. Manga are also comic books so yeah a point of manufacturing comic books will have both. Fun Personified...I just couldn't figure out which index it should go on.

Nearly everything got moved to Superhero Tropes, what remained was things that were comic specific or I thought "there's an issue there, better come back to it" so if you're sayng to yourself "If this is meant to be medium specific, what idiot put this here?", you're talking to the idiot.

edited 14th Apr '11 4:09:15 AM by SomeSortOfTroper

With a few exceptions, such as the "giant head thing", I would disagree that most of those are unique to anime as a medium - there is nothing exclusive in regards to the actual animation itself. Most of them are more like Japanese Cultural Tropes. We don't have enough examples of all types of Japanese media, but there are a lot of Anime Tropes found in JRPGs and other Japanese video games - because they're cultural in origin.

Again, I will grant that there are some exceptions, but in and of itself I don't think there's all that much distinguishing anime as a medium from other forms of animation. The difference is in the nature of the culture responsible for creating anime.

To add in support: plenty of the ones I left on Anime Tropes still had live action Sentai examples.

The page is ok as it is right now but I think that egregious useage of tropes should be there as well. (All of the examples I think are on the Anime Character Types index.... bah maybe I should just shut up.)

I agree that all these anime indexes should have another name, (BTW I think Japanese Media Tropes would be better than Japanese Culture Tropes, the latter sounds like it's exclusively about more complex sociological and historical issues, not things like Snot Bubble and Token Loli.), the tropes in Anime, Manga, JRPG, Visual Novels, and Light Novels, are all the same, starting with the art style, continuing with the character types and ending with the genres.

But I don't think that tropes should be excluded just because technically they are able to happen in other cultures' works. As long as they are reconizeably Japan-centric, that should be enough.

In the same way as we list Always Female and Always Male tropes that can theoretically have a Rare Male Example or Rare Female Example here and there, as long as they are recognizeably more common with one gender, something like On The Next Episode Of Catchphrase is clearly japanese, even if it has some Rare Western Examples.

edited 15th Apr '11 11:05:00 AM by EternalSeptember

That is for sure something that should go on the Anime Tropes index there are only 3 western examples and a crap ton of eastern examples (and I thought it was just a Gundam thing.) Overtook the Manga is another.

And yeah Japan-centric or Egregious use of a trope that people connect it to anime even though it appears elsewhere like Anime Anatomy and Zettai Ryouiki (just two extreme examples that got anime related trope names). Like how Most Common Superpower and Heroic Build are labeled comic book only as an aggregate of super hero comics but the basic trope appears in a lot of other places if it's on a work by work or person by person basis which is why it's misused 90% of the time. ( I have lots of issues with labeling them as a whole like that... Try making an anime trope like that and get laughed or flamed off the Internet.)

edited 15th Apr '11 12:45:42 PM by Raso