Tropes: intent versus existence, as criteria for what counts

glennmagusharvey

I raised a point about intent vs. existence in defining what a trope is and what examples count as such in another thread, and @Juan_Carlos briefly replied to it as well.

I mentioned that I don't really like tropes that are mere "existence"--my poster child for this problem is the meganekko trope, which sometimes just seems to be "animesque female with glasses".

That said, I was just wondering, is there a value to cataloguing such "existence tropes" anyway?  A trope such as the one indicated in this YKTTW for "Alternative Number System" seems shallow at first, but when I think about it, it could be very useful to a work creator if 'ey wanted to learn from how other writers/designers handled such a feature.

Gelzo

I think the obvious problem of making such a distinction when cataloguing is that it won't always be clear whether a trope was intended or not.

Elbeem

I'm not sure how this would A.) be provable in most cases, and B.) would be entirely relevant to the site mission in any case.

A work's creator obviously intended to include everything that is in their work, otherwise it wouldn't be there. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that they specifically decided to make use of certain tropes... the trope in question may just be something so ingrained in the creator's culture or technique that they use it without thinking about it. Thus, it would make for a valid example of the trope in question regardless of whether the creator intended to use it or not.

Now, this does not excuse trope decay, which can lead to problems where "girl who just happens to wear glasses" is listed every time it shows up in fiction. Appearance tropes should generally be tied to some type of character personality, or used in a way that invokes a certain type of audience reaction. I can't say for sure if Meganekko is set up that way, but if not it would be a good subject to bring up in TRS. This is what happened with one of the "[Color] Eyes" tropes, which was recently split up into a variety of different tropes tying the specific eye color to particular personality types it was often associated with.

glennmagusharvey

Well, I guess one could make the argument that meganekko, without some sort of extension of its definition beyond "happens to wear glasses", fails the "sitting on chairs" test in that it's not something that distinctively appears in creative media that doesn't also appear in real life.

Even so, though, the term should be recognized as a notable instance of fan-speak.

(Also, TRS isn't accepting new threads.)

And yeah, I agree with you that intent is often hard to discern, which makes this whole idea on my part a bit iffy.  Most authors do not have dev notes about their stories, and even those that have some notes or "making of" segments published may or may not highlight various details, some of which may also be intents that didn't actually get realized.

DYRE

That said, I was just wondering, is there a value to cataloguing such "existence tropes" anyway?

Yes, though not really one relevant to TVTropes' stated mission.  Probably one relevant to TVTropes' de facto mission, though, which seems to more or less be to just be a repository of random trivia... >.>

In any case though, it's true you can't really be 100% certain that something was or was not intentional, and arguably there isn't much value in doing so anyway.  A better criteria than intent would perhaps be if it actually contributes something significant to the work as a whole, though that also is problematic in that it isn't really well-defined.