The controversial topic of TV Tropes

[Thanqol]

Oh my god, the pony lovers are spreading their believe to other threads even though they already have 30 (thirty!) threads of their own. Someone stop them or this will be Pony Discussion soon...

There are 40 Dominic Deegan threads and the the webcomics forum is hardly Dominic Deegan swamped.

No, we don't need to convert your threads to pony discussion. You will end up coming to us.

[averagejoe]

There are 40 Dominic Deegan threads and the the webcomics forum is hardly Dominic Deegan swamped.

No, we don't need to convert your threads to pony discussion. You will end up coming to us.

The first deegan thread was created five years ago. The first pony thread was a year ago. The pony threads still win in terrifying-ness, I think.

[Thanqol]

The first deegan thread was created five years ago. The first pony thread was a year ago. The pony threads still win in terrifying-ness, I think.

Shhh, I'm trying to lull him into a false sense of security.

[Traab]

I have no idea how popular TVtropes is or isn't compared to with what it used to be. My complaint is one of structure and aesthetics, not of... well, whatever it is people are complaining about when they don't like popular things.

The hipster complaint basically works like this. They only like something because very few people have ever heard of it. Once it becomes well known and starts gaining popularity, they abandon it and go elsewhere. They dont like the trend itself as much as they like feeling as if they are on the bleeding edge of new things. Its an elitist thing, "Im so cool I find new things to follow that noone else knows about yet." If a new style of music is created, a hipster will love it... until it makes the top 100 charts. After that its "too mainstream" I doubt your average hipster would watch a youtube clip with more than 10k views.

[Trazoi]

For me it's not so much a hipster thing as a life cycle thing. A few years back TV Tropes was in the growth phase, where tropes were exploding into life and the site felt alive. Now it's in the consolidation phase where all the major works have been troped leaving the administrator types who like to edit. It's the same sort of thing that Wikipedia went through.

[SiuiS]

If criticizing the insertion of nomenclature from a particular piece of media - which TV tropes certainly qualifies for - one ought to avoid doing the exact same thing, particularly when relevancy is a concern.

True. But that wasn't what I was criticizing. My concern is with using jargon as a substitute for actual communication to give yourself a false sense of legitimacy. I do not feel someone is smarter because they can say Nakama or Xanatos Gambit. Those that do feel they are smarter for sying these things irritate me.

I will be honest and say that the knee jerk "stop speaking in code you jerk" thig is not a behavior I want to encourage in myself though. I'm just admitting it's there.

*snerk*

He probably didn't even realise he was doing it, you know. Posting in ponythread does that to most lesser mortals... Poor fellow.

It was actually intentional. What surprises me is that 'someone' in the above paragraph wasn't autocorrected. The O and P buttons are so close together... I tend to catch my finger heading for P and just let it run it's natural course unless intervention is truly needed.

Although that is what any set of specialist terminology sets out to do - encapsulate a complicated thought into a single term to make it easy to discuss. If you're not talking with someone who knows the terminology (i.e. non-tropers) then you're leaving people out of the loop and generally being rude. But if everyone knows what the terms mean then it's perfectly fine to use them as a shortcut, since that's what they're for.

Of course all someone says is "This character is meant to be a Magnificent Bastard but is more of a Smug Snake" and refuses to describe why, then it's pretty superficial analysis. (Those two tropes are weird. I'm not sure how happy I am with tropes that could be a failed application of another trope, but in other circumstances could be deliberate).

That's closer to what I mean. I understand the purpose of a trope name is shorthand; if the purpose of a conversation is to delve into the long version however, shorthand is iritating. And yes, frequently asking about what the hay a twenty Xanatos pileup is usually just gets a "go read tvtropes dot com." Which isn't helpful.

And yes, during conversations where everyone is informed (to the moon with you all, it's going to take me dedicated effort to start typing pony again!) we use whatever shorthand works. The question was specifically when addressing those without a clue, wasn't it?

Hm. On furher thought, no. It was jut about some guy having a hate-on for tv tropes. Ironically, that behavior is just as upsetting; I guess it's the unearned smugness and the unnecessary scorn involved.

[Deth Muncher]

Hell, I used TVTropes in class the other day because my professor mentioned trope in the literary context, and accepted that she'd know what I was talking about.

For reference, I was saying that the main character in the 18th century British novel "The Female American" was a Mary Sue.

[SiuiS]

I do dislike it when people constantly reference to tropes, because it seems to me they're not making an effort to speak for themselves..it's like if I said "diplodocus" to talk about animals with a long neck and then pointed you towards a dictionary/encyclopedia if it so happened that you didn't get the reference or know the animal in question...either because I can't be arsed to explain it to you and prefer to treat you with condescendence, or because I'm not all that intelligent and refer to the encyclopedia to explain things better than I ever could.
then there's the smug "oh, that's a *insert random trope*" whereby you'll always find someone dismissing something you like and talk about with a modicum of enthusiasm, basically looking down on it for not being creative enough to escape to the labelling trope of the moment.
newsflash: there cannot ever be anything truly new and never seen before in literature, cinema or music. everything can be "reduced" to a trope or list of tropes. everything has been done already in one or the other form. it doesn't take away from the quality of the product which does not depend (at least not solely) on adhering or not adhering to one or the other trope.

what bugs me ultimately is that more often than not tropes are used to "diminish" something (or possibly even make fun of it) that someone else has put a lot of effort into writing or otherwise creating.
also, the sheer quantity of tropes that exist (or pretend to exist..I get the feeling people lately just come up with a funny name, slap it onto something and "make a trope" for the sake of making the trope..not because it's actually identifying something vastly recurrent) kind of makes it not worthwile anymore to identify something as being example of said trope

were there not enough figures of speech??

I don't mind the occasional use or identification of something as an example of a trope..and have had a few good laughs reading the tvtropes website..but that's as far as I go.

That's a good point. Perhaps I'm Overly associating the behaviors of people I know who use tvtropes with the use of tvtropes in general. It is indeed that sneering sense of dismissal that infuriates me.

[Avilan the Grey]

The hipster complaint basically works like this. They only like something because very few people have ever heard of it. Once it becomes well known and starts gaining popularity, they abandon it and go elsewhere. They dont like the trend itself as much as they like feeling as if they are on the bleeding edge of new things. Its an elitist thing, "Im so cool I find new things to follow that noone else knows about yet." If a new style of music is created, a hipster will love it... until it makes the top 100 charts. After that its "too mainstream" I doubt your average hipster would watch a youtube clip with more than 10k views.

It is especially funny to watch when you know the person in question has been pushing said trend himself (aka "you GOT to check out this Site / Band / Author") and when all his friends are turned on to the thing he tried to turn them on to, he abandons it because of the reasons you state above.

[averagejoe]

The hipster complaint basically works like this. They only like something because very few people have ever heard of it. Once it becomes well known and starts gaining popularity, they abandon it and go elsewhere. They dont like the trend itself as much as they like feeling as if they are on the bleeding edge of new things. Its an elitist thing, "Im so cool I find new things to follow that noone else knows about yet." If a new style of music is created, a hipster will love it... until it makes the top 100 charts. After that its "too mainstream" I doubt your average hipster would watch a youtube clip with more than 10k views.

Odd. I mean, popularity isn't always unimportant, i.e. when it's a TV show I like, I hope it's popular so it will get renewed for a new season. Or, when it's a TV show I like but I suspect might end up going on too long, I hope it's unpopular. But I guess what you're talking about is more of an image thing.

You'll forgive me. Social movement's tend to pass me by. My friends explained the whole hipster thing to me once but I didn't really get it except for superficially. I'm still not convinced I've met one in real life yet.

[Knaight]

You'll forgive me. Social movement's tend to pass me by. My friends explained the whole hipster thing to me once but I didn't really get it except for superficially. I'm still not convinced I've met one in real life yet.

You're a moderator for a forum for a major webcomic. Obviously, you are just too mainstream to meet.

[Nerd-o-rama]

This. A thousand, billion times this.

It's even more hilarious when people go all smug posting tvtrope links as if it automatically justified their argument, and then it turns out said link actualy contradicts them, like that time some tvtropes fan insisted The Legend of Zelda was an RPG, and then the tvtropes page of said game explicitly classifies it as action-adventure.

That was me, and I was actually trying to prove you can make a publically editable wiki say anything you want. However, I underestimated the attentiveness of whomever appointed himself chief editor of the Legend of Zelda page of that time, who reverted my change rather quickly. For reasons I hope are obvious, I conceded the argument.

Hell, I used TVTropes in class the other day because my professor mentioned trope in the literary context, and accepted that she'd know what I was talking about.

For reference, I was saying that the main character in the 18th century British novel "The Female American" was a Mary Sue.

That's another thing that predates TV Tropes. "Mary Sue" as a term has been around since the 70's or 80's (the phrase originated in Star Trek fandom), and Mark Twain was criticizing James Fenimore Cooper for writing Gary Stus (among numerous other literary sins) a hundred years before that.

[Feytalist]

It's important to remember that TVTropes is not the only or even the original source of literary allusions such as these. Nor has it the sole mandate on naming tropes. Many, many tropes and their names have existed long before the website itself. It is possible to have been exposed to these ideas through other means, such as Lit courses for instance.

Reading through the whole damn mess does not impart some sort of exclusivity.

[Traab]

You're a moderator for a forum for a major webcomic. Obviously, you are just too mainstream to meet.

Agreed, he is a conformist of the highest degree, just look at his NAME! Obviously he is walking hipster kryptonite. Pretty sure they tend to explode when they wander too close. Tell me joe, have you noticed people randomly bursting into flames when they get within 100 feet of you? It was probably a hipster.

[The Glyphstone]

People sometimes burst into flames when they get too close to me. And by 'burst into flames', I mean 'start clawing at their face while blood streams from their eye sockets before they douse themselves in gasoline and light themselves on fire to end the torment'...

[dehro]

Holy late reply batman!



No, I don't. They are certainly more literally descriptive, but clearer? In what way? The tropes on the site are almost entirely made up of complex and esoteric observations about media; that's why most of the tropes are paragraphs-long articles and not five word descriptions. "Badass Decay," and, "Romantic False Lead," take the opposite tact of, "The Paolo," or, "Spikeification," - they're so generic that they're almost meaningless. It's easy to say that they're clearer names when you already know what they're referring to, but, "Romantic False Lead," can mean so many things. At the end of the day, I still have to read the article to understand what they're talking about.

well..yes..quite..but isn't that true of figures of speech too? who knew what a simile or a metaphor was before reading the definition? it's called learning things.

let's take the show Friends, trope namer for "tastes like feet".. you're going to need to have seen the episode it comes from to understand the reference (better yet if you've seen the bloopers), and even then each and every one of the examples in every cathegory, use different wordings to describe something that may well be said "it tastes horribly".. it's not like everybody has started to use the exact expression.
so not only do we learn that something which is very much a common occurrence whenever something goes wrong in the kitchen is now a trope..and one that needn't exist.... we also don't get it unless we know the source, so we're still going to have to read the article.
unless we just go with the litteral meaning of the words and say something tastes like feet, which need not be a trope to convey the message..effectively negating the need for smug elitism à la "you don't know the trope, so you're not getting it" ..
true..I don't know the trope but it doesn't need a genius to figure out you don't like my creme brulée if you say it tastes like feet.
so what's the point of making a trope about it? wasn't it much simpler to say "tastes like feet" is a metaphor, something we all should know from school?

[Soras Teva Gee]

I do dislike it when people constantly reference to tropes, because it seems to me they're not making an effort to speak for themselves..it's like if I said "diplodocus" to talk about animals with a long neck and then pointed you towards a dictionary/encyclopedia if it so happened that you didn't get the reference or know the animal in question...either because I can't be arsed to explain it to you and prefer to treat you with condescendence, or because I'm not all that intelligent and refer to the encyclopedia to explain things better than I ever could.
then there's the smug "oh, that's a *insert random trope*" whereby you'll always find someone dismissing something you like and talk about with a modicum of enthusiasm, basically looking down on it for not being creative enough to escape to the labelling trope of the moment.

There's a trope for that: Tv Tropes Will Ruin Your Vocabulary

I generally drop tropes because I explicitly wish to invoke them and lure people into looking them up. And coming back a few days later.Thus invoking another trope.

Muahahhahahaha!

[averagejoe]

Agreed, he is a conformist of the highest degree, just look at his NAME! Obviously he is walking hipster kryptonite. Pretty sure they tend to explode when they wander too close. Tell me joe, have you noticed people randomly bursting into flames when they get within 100 feet of you? It was probably a hipster.

I just thought my years of trying to develop psychic powers were finally paying off. I guess it's back to square one on that.

well..yes..quite..but isn't that true of figures of speech too? who knew what a simile or a metaphor was before reading the definition? it's called learning things.

Right, and that's my point. If you have to read the article either way, why go with the boring one?

[dehro]

Right, and that's my point. If you have to read the article either way, why go with the boring one?

because you're likely to already know that one and not need to "learn it"..I expect one encounters metaphors in just about any kind of formal education, even at basic levels.
because it encompasses a much broader range of similar examples than your average "specialized trope" does.
because it is much more likely that other people will actually know what you mean without having to be de facto forced to get online/go search for something they will most likely never again need to know.
because people talked about these matters a long time before tvtropes (or most other tropes) existed..and they managed just fine, which means that the english language already provides us with plenty of tools, without having to resort to smug elitist ones.
if I want to sit in on a conversation where I don't understand anything that is being said, I'll go to a conference on quantum physics.. and I'll sit there with an empty glass with a paper umbrella in it..I'll have asked for it.
when I'm debating stuff I do have the confidence to say I know a thing or two about, such as for instance a tv-show I watch or a book I've read, I would like to be able to do so without being forced to browse a website just to be able to keep up with the conversation.

[Traab]

I just thought my years of trying to develop psychic powers were finally paying off. I guess it's back to square one on that.



Right, and that's my point. If you have to read the article either way, why go with the boring one?

My point of view is this. If you use the "boring" one. You can click on the link with at least a general idea of what it entails, and the info on the link fills in the gaps. So romantic false lead at the very least implies that it doesnt have anything to do with high explosives. The Daisuke on the other hand, if you havent watched the anime, you dont have the slightest fricking CLUE what that could mean. It could be anything from a good thing, to a bad thing, to a personality trait, or a plot device. The Daisuke means NOTHING to those who dont already know who that is. Romantic false lead however, you can get the gist of by reading the title. No special knowledge required to piece that together.

[Whiffet]

Another reason to go for clearer trope names: it will (hopefully) cut down on the false or completely unrelated examples added to a page. I've read that the page It's Been Done, when entitled The Simpsons Did It, had a bunch of "examples" that only followed the literal trope title. I was blissfully unaware the site existed back then and didn't see it myself, so it might not have been that bad, but I bet it was a nightmare trying to keep the page clear.

[Lord Seth]

My point of view is this. If you use the "boring" one. You can click on the link with at least a general idea of what it entails, and the info on the link fills in the gaps. So romantic false lead at the very least implies that it doesnt have anything to do with high explosives. The Daisuke on the other hand, if you havent watched the anime, you dont have the slightest fricking CLUE what that could mean. It could be anything from a good thing, to a bad thing, to a personality trait, or a plot device. The Daisuke means NOTHING to those who dont already know who that is. Romantic false lead however, you can get the gist of by reading the title. No special knowledge required to piece that together.

Well, actually, Romantic False Lead used to be The Paolo. The Daisuke was the former name of Hopeless Suitor. Your point still stands, but I did want to correct that.

Though to be honest, I'm having a lot of trouble seeing how the new names are any more or less "boring" than the originals.

[Trazoi]

Though to be honest, I'm having a lot of trouble seeing how the new names are any more or less "boring" than the originals.

I'm fond of a good "The X" type name because it's got personality to it, and when you're in trope mode it's fun to see a whole bunch of them together when they're from wildly different media. I didn't like some of the badly chosen ones, like "The Mario" which if you were familiar with Mario almost certainly didn't mean what you thought it did. But if the character was a prime example of the trope I kind of liked them.

Those types of names also had an advantage is that they could be refined or expanded to mean exactly what the site wanted them to mean. With a descriptive name like "Romantic False Lead" you're stuck with whatever is covered by the name. And then there's issues with whether that name really does cover exactly what is covered by the trope - what exactly is a "false lead", someone who appears to be a protagonist but isn't? A name like "The Paolo" trades obscurity at first glance for some flexbility about definition. And it's got more pizazz.

[Coidzor]

People sometimes burst into flames when they get too close to me. And by 'burst into flames', I mean 'start clawing at their face while blood streams from their eye sockets before they douse themselves in gasoline and light themselves on fire to end the torment'...

Don't be so hard on yourself. Your popcorn's not that bad.

[averagejoe]

My point of view is this. If you use the "boring" one. You can click on the link with at least a general idea of what it entails, and the info on the link fills in the gaps. So romantic false lead at the very least implies that it doesnt have anything to do with high explosives. The Daisuke on the other hand, if you havent watched the anime, you dont have the slightest fricking CLUE what that could mean. It could be anything from a good thing, to a bad thing, to a personality trait, or a plot device. The Daisuke means NOTHING to those who dont already know who that is. Romantic false lead however, you can get the gist of by reading the title. No special knowledge required to piece that together.

Yeah, I said as much. But I don't use TVTropes to reference things. Before I did that, the articles would have to move away from superficial observations of stuff some people kinda like. That's what I'm trying to say - I don't have anything against such a naming convention, but it works against the site's strengths. Names that were clearly just made up by some people without much forethought, along with the, "There is no such thing as notability," philosophy all gave the site a unique charm and laid back tone, and that's why it was fun to read through the articles. I don't have any reason to need to pick something like, "Romantic false lead," off a list.

[Fiery Diamond]

I'm fond of a good "The X" type name because it's got personality to it, and when you're in trope mode it's fun to see a whole bunch of them together when they're from wildly different media. I didn't like some of the badly chosen ones, like "The Mario" which if you were familiar with Mario almost certainly didn't mean what you thought it did. But if the character was a prime example of the trope I kind of liked them.

Those types of names also had an advantage is that they could be refined or expanded to mean exactly what the site wanted them to mean. With a descriptive name like "Romantic False Lead" you're stuck with whatever is covered by the name. And then there's issues with whether that name really does cover exactly what is covered by the trope - what exactly is a "false lead", someone who appears to be a protagonist but isn't? A name like "The Paolo" trades obscurity at first glance for some flexbility about definition. And it's got more pizazz.

I just want to say: how is that an advantage? That's an inherently BAD thing! Ambiguous, malleable terms are generally useless.

In any case, TVTropes is a fun time waster, you can learn some interesting information there, and I certainly like their no-such-thing-as-notability motto; I do believe some random stick figure webcomic should be given just as much weight as Shakespeare (no, that wasn't tongue in cheek, I'm actually rather sick of literary elitism). But I'm on the side of those who are in favor of the clearer names. Daisuke is a name. It tells me nothing. The IDEAL trope name would be funny/witty/catchy AND informative, if you can't manage that then at least be iconic about it (like in Xanatos gambit, where the trope namer is pure distilled essence of the trope), and if you can't manage that either than stick with something that at least conveys something of what it's about. The thing you don't want is to have a trope name that communicates nothing, especially ones like Spikeafication which can miscommunicate ("so that means making something cooler and eviller by adding spikes, right?") and are not the only trope that could be associated with the trope namer either.

[Trazoi]

I just want to say: how is that an advantage? That's an inherently BAD thing! Ambiguous, malleable terms are generally useless.

I explained that really badly. I meant that a trope with a symbolic name like The X has flexibility at defining time to be limited to exactly what needs to be defined, whereas an explanatory title has to cover what's in the name. If someone is a romantic false lead, then they're a Romantic False Lead, despite what the blurb in the trope page says. I'm babbling because I can't think of a decent example where that would be an issue with that trope.

As to why that's an issue, it sort of depends on why people are putting things in TV Tropes to begin with, something I'm sure about. Is it an attempt to analyse storytelling to find the building blocks and techniques that go into telling them, or is it merely a listing of some stuff that happened in some media more than once?

[Gnoman]

To clarify why I dislike the push for descriptive names, I'll use a specific example. Fairly recently, a group of editors decided to "clean up" the Cult Classic section. One group tried to to eliminate any work from the page that didn't meet some standard of quality or other (to fit the "classic" part of the name.) A second group tried to push through a name change on the grounds that "Cult Classic" was an inherently subjective concept, and had to either be renamed to something bland and inoffensive or moved to YMMV. Both groups had less than a dozen members, and when the debate attracted the attention of more editors, both were thoroughly squashed because the term predates the website by decades. This illustrates a fundamental truth of the website. Much of the push for change comes from a relatively small number of contributors (the attempted axing of ALL "Real Life" sections on the wiki last year, for example, was almost universally reviled.)

[Soras Teva Gee]

To clarify why I dislike the push for descriptive names, I'll use a specific example. Fairly recently, a group of editors decided to "clean up" the Cult Classic section. One group tried to to eliminate any work from the page that didn't meet some standard of quality or other (to fit the "classic" part of the name.) A second group tried to push through a name change on the grounds that "Cult Classic" was an inherently subjective concept, and had to either be renamed to something bland and inoffensive or moved to YMMV. Both groups had less than a dozen members, and when the debate attracted the attention of more editors, both were thoroughly squashed because the term predates the website by decades. This illustrates a fundamental truth of the website. Much of the push for change comes from a relatively small number of contributors (the attempted axing of ALL "Real Life" sections on the wiki last year, for example, was almost universally reviled.)

Following on this I randomly found there is discussion to rename The Red Baron, which derives from a cross-cultural icon of military achievement.

Can anyone say you wouldn't understand what the Red Baron is or why going with some merely descriptive title is somehow better.

[averagejoe]

Following on this I randomly found there is discussion to rename The Red Baron, which derives from a cross-cultural icon of military achievement.

Can anyone say you wouldn't understand what the Red Baron is or why going with some merely descriptive title is somehow better.

And, see, that article is a good example of what's great about the site. It isn't even a real trope beyond just, "Has a nickname." The article is just to talk about really awesome characters who have nicknames. Which is slightly silly and a lot of fun.