Thread:Forum:Trope Talk/Cleaning up of questionable tropes/reply (3)

Something like Scary Black Man is certainly a trope. Just because it's a kind of trope that is used in bad ways doesn't mean it's not a trope.

Now, such things *do* often get misused; people get tempted to include every example of a black man who is scary, which is not right. Typically, though, I find that this happens when people who *oppose* racism or sexism or whatever try to name as many examples as they can of a trope in order to prove that racism and sexism is widespread. For instance, tropes like Black Guy Dies First have this problem--some black people are going to die first even if there's no racism at all and you need to distinguish between examples used as a trope and examples that just happen to exist.

I'm not convinced that the solution is to get rid of the tropes, though. This is ultimately a misuse problem, not a "because this trope is racist we shouldn't mention it" problem.


 * It would take an entire wiki listing down hot-headed characters

This is true. But some tropes are just used a lot. It would take an entire wiki to list every Action Hero. And if I wanted to expand Ho Yay I could easily go to fanfiction.net and name a couple of thousand Gundam Wing fanfics. We rely on the fact that people don't do that--they add works they are concerned with; nobody actually tries to list every example of a trope.

For that matter, if you're really worried that we don't have room for every example of something, tropes are the least of your worries. We don't have room for a page on every work of fiction that exists, let alone room for every hotheaded character. But we shouldn't stop listing works of fiction just because of that.