Okay, this is gonna make me sound a like a psycho, but “Torture” should be a trope, right?
Oh, don’t worry, you don’t sound like the Movie Psycho from the 1960s!
Jokes aside, agree. Would be especially useful for a lot of the Wilderness Material, since they did love to put the Doctor through some Torture! (Would be also probably useful as Trope since for plenty of People this can be quite a trigger point, which they probably do like to avoid!)
Exactly! I’m keeping track of the EDAs and ‘Being Tortured’ seems to be Eight’s third favorite activity, just behind ‘Nearly Dying from Massive Injuries’ and ‘Getting Amnesia’.
Y-yes, of course, to avoid!! To avoid it, that’s why I suggested it! To avoid… Ha ha \j
Eight going through it… but they still serve
I do have on my list a plan to make a page that lists them all, along with descriptions of what they are (some are a little confusing).
Yes, could be! Although there are many ways to define that. But yes there’s a lot of torture in Doctor Who, this lovely children’s show
I did also have plans to add “trigger warnings” which this crosses over into.
So many plans so little time!
If you can send me a list of all the stories you think have torture in, we can at least get the trope started… always difficult to start because then you’re missing loads.
Hmmm, that’s true… Maybe keep it to, uh, “official” torture? As in, it’s explicitly stated that the Doctor/companion is being tortured? Like, there’s a torturer and they’re imprisoned? (Woah, this sounds grim…)
Would multi-Doctor and Doctor-lite count as tropes…?
We have a similar thing called “Story Type” that covers Multi-Doctor, Doctor-lite, Companion-lite, Multi-Master, and loads more.
I’m not entirely sure why they are “Story Types” and not “Tropes”, or what the difference is really. It also contains things like “Christmas”, “Two-Parter”, “Anniversary”…
Does the difference make sense? Should I just roll them into one? What do people think?
(I get this question a lot so maybe it is time to combine them, or maybe if I just list them better it would help?)
- Make them all tropes
- Keep them separate
Oh, I see. I guess, personally, I was seeing “story type” kicking about and assuming that that just meant ‘is it a TV episode, an iPlayer thingie, an artbook, a comic, a poem’ - which was then confusing me because “media” already covers that. Does that make sense?
Idk what others think of it, but I think I would at least call multis and lites more of a trope than a type?
I don’t think two parter or anniversary are tropes so I say keep them separate. Tropes, for me, are more story elements rather than an overall structure (which could mean things like base under siege or pseudo-historical could become story types - those sorts of terms only Doctor Who fans use).
For me the difference is that a Story Type is something that the story is, like a Christmas special or a multi-Doctor story or a 2-parter, and a trope is an element that the the story contains. Going off the torture example, that’s something that a story can feature, but I don’t think many people would call any Dr Who story a ‘torture story.’
I also agree that it would make sense for things like base under siege and pseudo historical to be story tropes. They are so much more prevalent within Dr Who than most media, and most of the time take up the entire story more so that exist as an element within different types of stories.