#categorisation

[prokopetz]

I enjoy when people give me a hard time about using the term "sequential art" because they think it's just a pretentious way of saying "comics", because when I point out that "comics" and "sequential art" are overlapping but non-identical mediums, they invariably demand an example of sequential art that isn't comics, and I get to hit them with "PowerPoint presentations".

[hester-leggatt]

One of my girls showed me the 2025 Sorting Game the other day, and it brings me such joy I can hardly express myself!

Just look at all the glorious categories, all the items waiting to be sorted! And this is an incredibly small fraction. I could stay here for hours.

[heraklitismus]

Louder than Anaximander, Heraclitus proclaimed: "I see nothing other than becoming. Be not deceived. It is the fault of your myopia, not of the nature of things, if you believe you see land somewhere in the ocean of coming-to-be and passing away. You use names for things as though they rigidly, persistently endured; yet even the stream into which you step a second time is not the one you stepped into before."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, §5 [excerpt]

[gut-wrenching]

Hurl a rock and you’ll shatter an ontology, leave taxonomy in glistening shards.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman

[aislingean]

Semblances in rwby

Basic descriptions

Red is categories, green means ‘this semblance technically could go here too’

Speed

Ruby- speed but maybe not

Harriet Bree - super speed

Glyphs include ‘propulsion’ and ‘time dilation’ which have speed elements

Glyphs

Weiss- glyphs

Winter- glyphs

Illusions

Blake- shadow clones

Flynt coal- duplicates himself

Sun wukong- light clones

Neopolitan- physical illusions

Emerald sustrai- hallucinations

Glyphs include ‘summoning’ copies of a defeated enemy

Aura/semblance control (including healing and invulnerability)

Jaune- aura amplification

Edward Caspian - blocks other people’s semblances

Tock- can become temporarily invulnerable

Hazel - completely numbs pain

Power up

Yang- redirecting energy of an attack she’s taken

Nora- produce and channel electricity to her muscles, making her stronger

Coco Adele - amplifies the power of her ammunition

Jaune can power up other people’s semblances

Emotions

Lie Ren- emotion masking

August Caspian - emotion amplification

The mind

Yatsuhashi Daichi- can cause temporary memory loss

Fox Alistair - telepathy

Marrow amin - freeze his opponents movements

Velvet scarlatina- photographic memory/mimicry

Emeralds hallucinations are technically mind manipulation too

Passive

Qrow Branwen - misfortune

Clover Ebi - good fortune

Maria Calavera- ultra fast reflexes

¯\_(:/)_/¯

Vine Zeki - aura arm extensions

Elm Ederne - can firmly plant herself in one spot (root boots??)

Heat

Cinder fall- super heats objects and control their shape

Bertilak- generates heat

Yang generates heat and sometimes combusts

Telekinesis

Pyrrha- control over magnetism

Carmine Esclados- telekinesis

Glynda Goodwitch- telekinesis

Cinder has mild telekinesis abilities

Portals/telportation

Raven Branwen - portals

Teleportation may be an element of Ruby’s semblance

[astranemus]

...whatever has been pierced by the searchlight of the intellect is instantaneously transformed into a mere /thing/, a quantifiable object for our thought that is henceforth only mechanically related to other objects. The paradoxical expression of a modern sage, "we perceive only that which is dead," is a lapidary formulation of a deep truth.

Ludwig Klages, On Consciousness and Life in The Biocentric Worldview

[prokopetz]

"So does it count if" let's stop right there. All systems of classification are fake. We made them up. They are not capable of being correct or incorrect; they are only useful or not useful. The question you should be asking is not "does A technically fit into category B?", but rather, "does it have utility to draw our lines such that A fits into category B?"

[prokopetz]

You've talked a lot about how TvTropes isn't suitable for literary analysis (the specifics elude me), but I haven't been able to parse your point, could you possibly elucidate on your thoughts of TvTropes as an institution?

The short version is that all systems of categorisation are at least in part prescriptive, in the sense that each one depends on a particular set of assertions about how the lines between categories ought to be drawn. When you sort things into buckets, you're not just describing those things – you're also enforcing those boundaries. This isn't inherently a bad thing, but it's critical to recognise that when you apply a paritcular system of categorisation to a particular topic, you're forcing that topic into a shape that will fit into that system's buckets.

To the topic at hand, then, the issue with TV Tropes is that its system of categorisation – that is, how it relates tropes into hierarchies, how it draws the lines that separate one trope from another, even its basic concept of what a "trope" is – are all informed by the fact that it started out as a Joss Whedon fansite, and even though most of its present users aren't aware of that fact, its analytic framework has never really moved beyond those roots. Any media that's understood through the lens of TV Tropes' system of categorisation unavoidably gets smooshed into the general shape of a TV show written by Joss Whedon, whether that was the intent or not. This is a perfectly fine analytic lens if what you're describing is, in fact, a TV show written by Joss Whedon, but it becomes a progressively worse fit the further you get from that sphere of competence.