Rework: Main/Maid Corps

Maid Corps looks like it's having a lot of servants, but it goes out of its way to make it clear that's not the case. If we renamed it to something better indicating the trope, there wouldn't have to be that worry.

Also, there doesn't seem to be a hard line to tell what fits and what doesn't.

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

Pulled right from the description, "[T]his trope about someone who is so rich, he has a whole army of hundreds of maids..."

The first paragraph and very beginning of the second in the description do make it feel a bit muddled and misleading, but it's nothing Wiki Magic can't solve after a quick fix. Everything after the immediate beginning of the description seems fine.

edited 6th Sep '10 11:14:56 AM by SeanMurrayI

Rewrote to take out the sentence about "This is about the character who's so rich...", since the rest of the definition makes it clear that it's about the maids not the employer.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

It looks like two components are necessary, by my reading:

• 1. Hundreds of servants
• 2. They all wear maid outfits, regardless of their actual duties

This happens enough to be tropeable?

edited 6th Sep '10 3:22:11 PM by suedenim

Jet-a-Reeno!

All the examples are from Anime and Manga works, by the looks of it. Knowing how batshit a lot of it is, I guess it's possible. I'm certainly not the one to judge the accuracy of the examples; it certainly has enough to be a trope though.

For anything else, the only thing that's coming to mind is that Family Guy musical number with butlers maids and other servants at Mr. Peterschmitt's mansion.

edited 6th Sep '10 3:34:31 PM by SeanMurrayI

There are also the maids in Annie. But he refused to put any western examples in the trope when it was on the YKTTW even though they were suggested.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Looking at the YKTTW, most of the western examples didn't fit. Cruise ships and hotels don't have lots of exta maids, they simply have a need for a very large staff. Royal households are also completely not what the rope is about — it might number in the hundreds, but much of the staff would be nobles "in attendance", not really servants. I've never seen a production of Annie with "hundreds of maids" — ten or a dozen sure; maybe as many as twenty.

So I'm wondering whether we should redefine it to "an unreasonably large number of maids for the size of the establishment": a huge fancy house with a hundred would fit; a married couple living in an apartment with half a dozen would also fit. (realistically, in Victorian England, a family that owned one of the big country houses and did a great deal of entertaining might have a dozen all told but ten would be a very large household— the mistress's ladies-maid, the ladies-maid to the daughters if there were any daughters; four or five upstairs housemaids to do the cleaning and a couple of scullery maids to help in the kitchen.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Army Of Maids?

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

Would it have been too much if someone had at least PM'd me about this? I am the one that started the YKTTW discussion on it and guided its creation process, after all.

In any case...

1. I didn't include the Western examples because I wasn't sure about them qualifying, due to not being familiar with their works. I had expected that Wiki Magic would solve this after I had further refined the definition.

2. Maid Corps hinges on three elements:
   1. Much more maids than strictly necessary; around 2-3 times at a minimum would be the average example.
   2. The "maids" span multiple responsibilites that extend beyond the realistic scope of domestic chores - computer-based information gathering and private militia, for example. And yes, that means that even those who should be wearing more sensible outfits are instead wearing stereotypical maid dresses.
   3. Their employer is normally never stated to have his finances suffering from employing so many maids and for so many (often high-budget) "responsibilities". This is typically a sign of being a Fiction 500 member.

The first two conditions' implementation can be somewhat variable (though they must be used), but unless the plot demands it at a certain point (after which it is often conveniently never brought up again), the third is a practically universal aspect of the trope; a typical Maid Corps should be a financial and bureaucratic nightmare to manage in Real Life, yet their employers do not even hint towards this ever happening.

I thought that I had included that stipulation somewhere in the description.

edited 21st Sep '10 7:30:31 PM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Bump

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Well first of all, I suggest you rewrite the description and include those three points.

Second, that's why I suggest a rename, to make it clear that it's not just a lot of servants.

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

My final draft of the article did include those three points, though admittedly without the small clarification on the variability of use for the first two; and it still does contain the remaining two points. However, someone had decided to remove the third point because "it doesn't fit the trope". If no one minds, I'll re-add that part.

And Maid Corps is a perfectly fitting name; the main meaning of the word "corps" is - aside from the obvious military definition - "organized group of people united by a common purpose", not "large numbers of people".

EDIT: Reworked the description. You may refine it as you see fit.

edited 26th Sep '10 10:35:15 PM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

I believe I took out that third point, because the trope was about the maids, but it was about the employer.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Yes, but the suspiciously prevalent lack of any mention regarding the impact of employing a Maid Corps on one's finances is an integral trait of the trope.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Ok, That I can see. But when I changed the description in the first place it was mostly about how rich the employer needed to be, and then "Oh yeah, the trope is actually about the maids."

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Point taken. How is the current trope description, then?

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

BTW, the name is not fine, because not everyone associates "corps" to mean "a group that is larger than actually needed in real life".

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

Then you seem to have forgotten the "variability of implementation" part of the conditions. Besides, logically speaking, the "too many maids" aspect only factors if the Maid Corps more than the required (wo)manpower for a given "department".

And the description makes it clear that there are actually three kinds of Maid Corps:

1. One composed of too many maids for regular domestic work.
2. One that handles stuff beyond regular domestic work, from first-class private medical care to computer-based information gathering to paramilitary operations.
3. One that combines both of the above.

edited 27th Sep '10 1:27:28 AM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

"Then you seem to have forgotten the "variability of implementation" part of the conditions. Besides, logically speaking, the "too many maids" aspect only factors if the Maid Corps more than the required (wo)manpower for a given "department"."

Are you new here? Because you seem to be using the description to justify a title. It doesn't work that way. Too many misused tropes have shown a title that causes confusion cannot be stopped simply by using a clear description.

If you want to defend the title, it has to stand on its own, with nothing else on the page, because too many people here are just going to see the title, and try to assume the trope from that.

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

Relatively speaking, I may be considered a "newbie", as I have been an active member for not much more than around a year.

That side, I actually came up with the title both from the description itself, and by from the Trope Namer, Hanauykou Meido-Tai; the tai in Meido-Tai literally means "team, corps".

Additionally, I thought that the confusion about this trope came from the apparent self-contradiction of the description, not the name. "Corps" is used in such phrases as "diplomatic corps", "press corps", etc., after all, and none of these imply anything about "unusually large number of employees". Is there any confirmation that more than one person had confused the trope's definition due to its name?

edited 27th Sep '10 2:25:19 AM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

"and none of these imply anything about "unusually large number of employees"."

That's the point. The trope is about an unusually large number, and the word "corps" does not imply that.

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

I thought I had already made it clear that the "unusually large number" aspect is only one of two primary subtypes that can be combined into a third.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

How does the word "corps" cover the other type as well? This is about having maids that are too many for Real Life households, and/or maids that do far more than just cleaning.

Actually, those are two separate tropes. Just because they sometimes overlap doesn't mean they are otherwise the same.

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

One: Please specify why you believe them to be separate tropes, as I see little sense in splitting Maid Corps into two separate tropes without a strong justification; just because two of Maid Corps' three core traits do not always occur simultaneously is not a good reason for a hard-split.

Two: Aside from the Trope Namer issue, "corps" (in a non-military context) is generally defined as "a body/group of people associated together/united by a common purpose". The unifying aspect of a Maid Corps is that they are all "maids" - in the sense that they all fulfill the definition of "maid" as "a female servant", and they all wear (often) "stereotypical" maid uniforms (often French Maid-style), with some room for department-relevant customization (e.g. the "security division" of Hanaukyo Maid Tai title Maid Corps).

edited 27th Sep '10 1:49:37 PM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

1. It's the difference between "I have three dozen maids even though this house only needed one dozen" and "I have only as many maids as I need, but they all can do other cool things".

2. The definition includes being a servant anyway.

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.