The Same but More

A popular type of The Same but More Specific.

Essentially, this is when a trope can be summed up as "the same as Article X, but pumped Up to Eleven". While the temptation to start these sort of articles is evidently irresistible -- hardly a day goes by that one doesn't show up in YKTTW -- they are almost always a bad idea for a number of reasons, not the least of which is where to draw the dividing line between "Trope X" and "Trope Xtreme".

A common variant is when someone wants to write "Article X, but done well" or "Article X, but done poorly". Remember that Tropes are Neither Good Nor Bad -- tropes are value-neutral, and whether they come across as positive or negative depends on how an individual work uses them. Besides, attempting to split tropes by their execution can be extremely subjective, since fans of a given work will argue that it belongs in the "good" pile while detractors constantly move it back into the "bad" pile. This continues, probably interminably.

Remember, Tropes Are Flexible. There's enough untapped content to go around already -- there's really no point in rehashing what we've already got. Sometimes you might think there is a quantitative difference in a new trope, but if the examples are mostly the same as the earlier trope, then you're basically just duplicating the one that already exists.

Now if the difference actually is clear, the result may be a Sub-Trope, Super-Trope, or Sister Trope of another. For example, Critical Research Failure looks like Did Not Do the Research taken Up to Eleven (and, in some ways, it is), but the difference is quite clear in practice: Any lay person can immediately spot a Critical Research Failure, whereas by contrast it generally takes an expert (or at least somebody who's done their own research) to prove when a writer simply Did Not Do the Research. Thus, the examples in each trope are almost mutually exclusive, despite their definitions on paper being The Same but More.

If you think your extreme trope has the distinction worthy of a Sub-Trope, please check with the other Tropers first and to get opinions; if other people agree that the Sub-Trope label applies, it probably does; likewise, if they're all calling it The Same but More, they're probably right.

See also Exaggerated Trope, which covers tropes being played Up to Eleven in-universe, and Downplayed Trope, which covers the opposite.