Administrivia: People Sit on Chairs
aka: People Sitting On Chairs
While this has no plot bearing, Nanoha from Tropes
Lyrical Nanoha is left-handed.
Example from the now-deleted page "Everyone Is Right Handed" about Lyrical Nanohanote
are conventions used in storytelling to convey some sort of information to the audience. People Sit On Chairs don't convey any meaning — they aren't storytelling conventions at all, they're just things that happen normally or incidentally during the storytelling. So if somebody is calling your YKTTW
"Chairs" or "PSOC", this means they think your idea is about as meaningful as the discovery that various different shows portray people sitting on chairs
: It doesn't matter how commonly it occurs, this is something that never carried any meaning to begin with, making it Not a Trope
The whole point of a chair, as Facebook so eloquently explains,
is to give people something to sit on, but this by itself doesn't convey meaning. On the other hand, there are
ways in which chairs can be used for a trope; perhaps we're talking about an impossibly awesome-looking chair
(or a more functional Super Wheelchair
); maybe it gets used for a Chair Reveal
, or for the Big Bad
to express his Slouch of Villainy
. And maybe the chair is conspicuous by its emptiness
. All these add some sort of meaning to the "chair" in question, which makes them legitimate tropes.
Note that the criticism here isn't simply that the trope in question is "too common" or "too broad", as No Trope Is Too Common
. There are some extremely common cliches
, and Omnipresent Tropes
, that appear in fiction maybe even as frequently as chairs, but these are still storytelling devices. For instance there is The Couch
, another item people sit on, but given a purpose that correlates with the visual layout of house floorplans
Conversely, a trope suggestion can still be guilty of People Sit On Chairs even if it doesn't literally appear all the time. Even if it is relatively rare, it can still be used without a narrative purpose. For example, there may be only three works of fiction in which a person walks down a street called Jameson Street, but unless that name has some relevance to the storytelling beyond just being a street name, it is People Sit On Chairs: there is no meaningful pattern or connection between these works.
If you are really, really, really
sure that we need this one, try to connect it to something meaningful (which doesn't necessarily have to be an element of the plot; it can work if the trope counts as Narrative Filigree
or Garnishing the Story
). Or if you can identify several narrative purposes for an element, you can propose it as an index, like Seated Tropes
. If not, you just need to accept that this trope page will never happen.
If you're really not sure whether or not your YKTTW
is People Sitting On Chairs, try asking "Is This Tropable?
See also Consistency
for the other aspect of defining a trope.
Note that for purposes of this page, it is assumed that all humans do
sit on chairs, making this page itself an example of Small Reference Pools
. In Real Life
, one of the Basic Anthropological Divides is between people who sit at ground level— carpet, tatami, cushion, the ground itself— and people who sit above ground level— chair, bench, snow-house shelf.
here, please. No, really, they're not necessary.