fails at being neutral: Overused Copycat Character

How would it not be worth keeping? Are you still not getting what the definition is?

I don't think superior even read the last several posts.

It's a possibility. Not nearly the most likely one, but a possibility, and all possibilities deserve mention.

^^^^^ "And splitting off just this for gamers makes it The Same But Less."

This is what the the crowner voted. Everyone had the chance to look at OCC and even Fountain of Expies, and they overwhelmingly preferred a variation that includes keeping the gamer variant as a split, even when we had the same option without keeping that variant, and another option to do nothing.

Probably they agreed with the reasoning that Gamers Tend To Be Unimaginative As Character Creators is a different trope from Making Jokes About Characters Being Copied A Lot.

By the way, here is the YKTTW, I tried to write it as different from the others as I could.

edited 2nd Sep '10 1:20:39 PM by Superior

I think I agree that "Gamers tend to make characters that are similar to existing characters," is different than "Characters get overused a lot," I'm just not sure if the gamer-specific variant (Which is specific because of the way it's used not because it's arbitrarily gamers-only), is tropable.

And in either case, OCC has the issue that needs to be decided if the listing should be:

• Report Siht gets used a lot as a generic character.
• Alice gets used as a generic character places
  • Sometimes alongside Bob

Or if it should be listed as:

• Work A used a character identical to Report Siht
  • So did Work B
  • And Work C made fun of it

edited 2nd Sep '10 1:28:10 PM by Twilightdusk

"This is what the the crowner voted. Everyone had the chance to look at OCC and even Fountain Of Expies, and they overwhelmingly preferred a variation that includes keeping the gamer variant as a split, even when we had the same option without keeping that variant, and another option to do nothing."

That's largely because the winning entry is full of wrong information. For one thing, it claims the trope was expanded, which is false (just because it's on a con point doesn't make it valid).

For another, it assumes that a part of the trope without the "make fun of all the copies" part is somehow a split, when that's actually the Super-Trope.

And "self-designed player characters tending to be rip-offs, mostly in Tabletop Games and Video Games" is not actually part of this trope either. How can works choosing to make fun of gamers for doing this be the same as gamers doing it? That's like saying because Even Nerds Have Standards includes LARPing at the bottom rung, that the trope actually is about LARPing.

So those points are already separate. Thus they cannot be split. They have to be attached first, not detached. The crowner cannot make them part of the trope, no matter how it's written to make it seem that way.

So this would not be somehow made moot by having those other tropes as well. Or are you still under the assumption that this is somehow a negative trope? If works choose to mock something, then they objectively choose to do it. ALL this trope does is note that they do so.

edited 2nd Sep '10 1:32:13 PM by DragonQuestZ

Leaving the trope be is also an option, lets take this break while the other two go through YKTTW to cool off, and then come back to this later when we can look at things objectively rather than treating this as a contest of "I'm right you're wrong."

edited 2nd Sep '10 1:35:23 PM by Twilightdusk

If you declare a trope X when it's actually Y, and then act as though making X somehow calls Y's fate into question, the logic there is just flat out wrong. There is no cooling down over that. It's still wrong.

Superior started this thread under a bunch of wrong assumptions about this trope, and has not actually acknowledged that the rest of us agree that it's not like that.

edited 2nd Sep '10 1:39:40 PM by DragonQuestZ

My comment was aimed at Superior as much as it was at you, and it also applies to me as much as anyone. But right now, the two of you are going a bit back and forth, both utterly convinced that their own interpretation is the correct one. What I'm suggesting is we take a break, step away from this trope for a while, then come back once we've had some time to calm down from arguing and look the trope over again.

The problem is superior doesn't seem to be willing to argue. You, I, and a few others are willing to discuss this.

He (assuming that user is a he) is still assuming this is negative, when it isn't, and is assuming that separate tropes to this can be split off. That's impossible.

DQZ, I'm mostly in agreement with you in this argument, but replying like that to someone when they say "let's back down and cool off for a bit" is not cool.

I think you're getting yourself too worked up over process and the rights and wrongs of it and what will go down in the history books, or something. When the "Drizzt syndrome" trope is up we can just put a disclaimer that to qualify, an example should have actually been mocked in some professional work, because otherwise it'll become complaining about characters you don't like. The fountain of expies one will either be differentiated from Trope Codifier in the YKTTW or never be launched.

This trope won't get "split", it'll just be a content donor to some new tropes which need the content.

edited 2nd Sep '10 1:54:47 PM by TripleElation

"This trope won't get "split", it'll just be a content donor to some new tropes which need the content."

I'm okay with that. I got a problem with the insistence that those somehow make the current trope a dubious one, especially when the user doing the insisting still seems to think this trope is negative.

Well, the worst that'll happen is that the current trope will have to migrate. As far as I understand it's suffered a lot of Trope Decay anyway, so it might shed the worst bits of it in the migration process.

Again, I actually support that. In fact, I'll see about the description now.

Also, one paragraph in the description should be for fountain of expies. I'm putting the text here, and someone can put it in that trope upon launching.

"It's sort of like character who is not a PublicDomainCharacter but gets treated as if he or she was one, but since most of us know better, we call out how we aren't being fooled. It is also, given the length of modern copyrights, the surest way to know that someone has hit on a new character {{Archetype}}."

edited 2nd Sep '10 2:03:33 PM by DragonQuestZ

One of the issues was overlapping concepts, which will soon become separate tropes. Once those concepts have been launched as tropes, we can come back to this, trim off the parts that made if overlap with these other concepts, and generally clean things up so that others don't get the assumption Superior did.

However, while we're waiting for those other tropes to be structured is a perfect opportunity to step away and cool off a bit.

Cool off what? I just want to make it clear this doesn't get cut or something similar?

Getting assurance of that will cool me off, not simply being told to.

We do not cut, split, merge, redefine, or perform any other action until we discuss it properly. The current discussion is being bogged down to a certain extent and could benefit from a short break, during which no drastic action should be performed on this trope.

Well I just did a drastic action, which was to redo the description, and cut out the parts that made it look like it included the other tropes.

I really should have done that a while ago, even before this thread.

For examples of the gamer version, a lot of gamer comics mock the trope. It would be a bit like Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies. It's something where the in media examples are a bit more meta.

I'm not sure I'd call it drastic, it does help quite a bit though.

Personally I'm still wondering if the example should be by character (Character A gets used a lot, Character B has a lot of copies, etc.), or sorted by works making fun of it (Work A makes fun of how every superhero is Superman, Work B takes a stab at gamers always re-using Drizzt).

The jokes are the point of the trope, so it would be sorted by that.

We may have to stage a cleanup of examples then, they seem mixed between the two.

Well some examples would be on more than one page, like with many Sister Tropes.

BTW, the one about gamers basing their characters after popular characters doesn't necessarily require a show to mock it (can include it, but should be a necessity). It could just note that gamers do that, similar to Complacent Gaming Syndrome.

edited 2nd Sep '10 2:35:43 PM by DragonQuestZ

What I meant was, some of the examples are just:

• Superman and Batman are so iconic, and so widely imitated, that they now have pastiche versions who are a married gay couple.
• Godzilla
• Wolverine got enough imitators in Image Comics, when it first started, for magazines to joke about it.

The first two options would be moved to fountain of expies. The third ends with the words "to joke about it". How would that not be a proper example? The magazines are choosing to mock the character being copies. How does that not fit in the current trope? I would think the key words make it very clear it's an example.

edited 2nd Sep '10 2:41:44 PM by DragonQuestZ

The focus of the example is the character being parodied, rather than the (uncited) work doing the parody.

That's my question, should the examples be "This character gets used and parodied a lot," And/Or "This work parodied the fact that this character gets used a lot."

edited 2nd Sep '10 3:01:40 PM by Twilightdusk