Unclear Description: King Koopa Copy

...Conflating "Bowser-like villains" with dragons makes me kinda think you stopped reading at firebreathing, TBH.

I mean, Bowser is based on a dragon though. That's just what he's meant to invoke. I don't see how the last bit alters that.

Anyway, if this archetype is more than just "draconic video game boss", what is it actually? I keep asking to know what makes this concept unique and nobody has answered it yet.

He's much more dinosaurian, IMO. Though honestly that's a bit of a side issue. The bigger problem I have with that is, again, this weird attempt to redefine tropeworthiness around "uniqueness". "Villains based on/similar to Bowser" is the trope being proposed. Maybe that's not actually a common enough thing to justify having, especially given the existence of shoehorning, but this attempt to officially skew the site FAR to the lumper side of the lumper-vs-splitter dichotomy seriously needs to stop.

Edit: Or at the very least have some kind of full-scale policy discussion instead of coming up repeatedly in individual TRS threads.

Edited by nrjxll on Aug 24th 2023 at 9:34:50 AM

I mean, I'm asking because option 2 is not to define the trope as Bowser expies, it's to retool into an archetype, but nobody will explain what that archetype is and why it's a separate and unique concept. My issue at hand has nothing to do with how King Koopa Copy is currently defined since nobody appears to want to keep the trope as-is.

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 24th 2023 at 10:35:56 AM

But the proposal was:

The main problem with the current trope is that Bowser expies - as with expies of all kinds - are extremely uncommon. Basing a trope on him is not in itself automatically flawed, though again it's possible it might not work in practice.

I never said it is automatically flawed, though? All I said was that "Archetype of characters similar to Bowser" is not "Bowser Expy" and if it's an archetype there needs to be more meat to it than just "characters similar to Bowser in some way". Again, all I want to know is what will make this archetype stand out as a unique trope in its own right and not merely the combination of popular tropes that Bowser happened to use when being designed.

I know what the proposal was but that doesn't answer the question, and this question needs to be answered as even people just simply being unsure if the concept does stand alone is making people jump to disambig.

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 24th 2023 at 10:42:09 AM

Now I feel bad because I came up with the proposal and did not thoroughly think it over before writing the OP. That's 100% on me and I apologize. I had a vague idea in my head of what I was talking about but I didn't put enough thought/work into it or the OP and I screwed up in that regard.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Aug 24th 2023 at 10:47:01 AM

Yet again, this is not how we define tropes. Most tropes where there's actually a particular identifiable origin can be analyzed as combinations or derivatives of other preexisting tropes. What matters is whether the 'new' trope is in itself a recurring pattern in fiction.

Again, I don't really have any real investment in whether King Koopa Copy specifically is a trope. But the arguments for cutting it, as they stand, are at best completely misunderstanding tropeworthiness and at worst feel like a deliberate attempt to redefine the entire site.

Edited by nrjxll on Aug 24th 2023 at 9:50:01 AM

Eh, it's not the OP's job to come up with a foolproof plan for everything. This discussion is fine if we get something better out of it but either way I wouldn't stress too much, the answer will be given at some point somehow.

Like I said before I'm not against the idea of making this into an archetype if we can come up with a solid justification for it; I'm just unsure right now if it actually is an archetype in its own right, because an archetype does need to be more than "Bowser-like bad guy".

I mean... technically yes but technically no. Right now there's precedent for "if we can get the exact same point across just by using other tropes, it's not a unique trope in and of itself". In other words, those other tropes at least tend to have some specific difference beyond merely being a recurring pattern in fiction (which in and of itself is not how tropes are defined; tropes need to have meaning or relevance of some sort, and if the only relevance or meaning is already captured by the tropes that combine to form it, it's not a unique trope of its own). This is not just something established in other expy threads, either; I know it's happened in other cases too. Tropes that do not have any unique purpose in a story aren't really considered tropes as far as precedent goes. This is not me or anyone else redefining anything — this is what consensus has begun to dictate as tropeworthy / non-tropeworthy.

Or to put it another way: If this "archetype" does not have a unique identity beyond the tropes attached to it, why couldn't those other tropes and archetypes just be used instead?

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 24th 2023 at 10:58:26 AM

I am personally for reworking.

nrjxll, complaints about how people misunderstand the Fountain of Expies tropes and is a sum of tropes is a trope are interesting, but it may be worth going to own thread because we're here to discuss what to do with King Koopa Copy specifically.

For which my argument is that "characters based on Bowser" are not very common or are coincidental, so at least it needs to be de-troped, and Yard/TLP can figure out if examples could be repurposed in free time.

Edited by Amonimus on Aug 24th 2023 at 9:13:39 PM

I think the key point is, are the component tropes disproportionately likely to correlate with one another, with it being particularly likely that a significant number of those tropes appear at once? If so, that's at least a Trope in Aggregate.

So the options are...rework, disambig, cut, split in two?

Reworking, disambiguating, and cutting could be options, but what would splitting mean in this case?

Edit: Oh, OK, the OP answers that question. Give me a bit and I'll get a crowner ready.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Aug 27th 2023 at 10:55:39 AM

We only have 138 wicks, so it shouldn't take too long.

Edit: Notified the Pantheon thread, so don't worry about those wicks.

Edited by Berrenta on Aug 30th 2023 at 1:22:03 PM

Are we supposed to move (full context) examples to Expy if they fit there? Because for now I've just cut some, but I was wondering if they're supposed to be moved instead.

Edited by JDMA12 on Aug 30th 2023 at 4:21:39 PM

Go ahead. I think I'm just gonna move those to Shout-Out (or the work's Shout-Out subpage if it has one)

Edit: Expy could work too depending on the context given though.

Edited by AudioSpeaks2 on Aug 30th 2023 at 9:55:54 PM

I mean... it really depends. It would be a Shout-Out if the work is straight up referencing or parodying Bowser, but an Expy if it's just based on him. There is a difference.

Yeah.

An anthropomorphic dragon/turtle villain making a comment along the lines of "I hate plumbers" or "Never really liked Italians", i.e. something that makes a reference to things specific to/exclusive to Bowser/the Mario franchise, would be a shout out.

But an anthropomorphic dragon/turtle villain holding a princess hostage isn't a shout out since that's not specific to Bowser/Mario.

Edited by amathieu13 on Aug 30th 2023 at 7:06:48 AM

But I mean, like I've said several times now, I think there's a really fundamental problem in how we're approaching Fountain of Expies pages in general because characters at least partly based on other characters are a lot more common than characters actually being Expies, which has a very specific definition.

Should we move the Fountain of Expies up in the TRS at this point? Because I think the score needs to be settled.

IDK how that affects where individual examples go, though.

Taking a look at Expy, I don't think I know enough about either Mario or most of the works I'd be cleaning to know if it's an actual example of Expy. I'll just cut them, better than possibly misusing.