Bronze-level articleTV Tropes

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Regularly visiting the website will make you a lot more keen and aware of the various tools, cliches and story structures that are used in fictional works. It is a matter of debate whether this generates a greater appreciation of media, or if it just makes one more cynical about it. TV Tropes itself jokingly alludes to this tendency, claiming that the site will ruin your life<ref>[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TVTropesWillRuinYourLife TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life]</ref> and, by extension, your vocabulary<ref>[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TVTropesWillRuinYourVocabulary TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Vocabulary]</ref> as you start seeing tropes in everything you read, watch or play, and even start using trope terms like "lampshading," "your mileage may vary" and "anvilicious" in your everyday speech.
 
Regularly visiting the website will make you a lot more keen and aware of the various tools, cliches and story structures that are used in fictional works. It is a matter of debate whether this generates a greater appreciation of media, or if it just makes one more cynical about it. TV Tropes itself jokingly alludes to this tendency, claiming that the site will ruin your life<ref>[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TVTropesWillRuinYourLife TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life]</ref> and, by extension, your vocabulary<ref>[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TVTropesWillRuinYourVocabulary TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Vocabulary]</ref> as you start seeing tropes in everything you read, watch or play, and even start using trope terms like "lampshading," "your mileage may vary" and "anvilicious" in your everyday speech.
  
Because the regulars of the editing staff tend to be unapologetic nerds, the content of the wiki veers in the direction of things that will mainly interest other nerds. While you will certainly find pages on more classical and conventional works like Victor Hugo's ''Les Miserables'' (both the book and the musical) and Machiavelli's ''The Prince'', the pages for geek interests like ''The [[Twilight Zone]]'' or the aforementioned ''Buffy'' are a lot more detailed, while many of the trope names are derived from such nerd favorites as ''Doctor Who'', ''Batman'' and ''[[Discworld]]''. Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on how much of a literary snob you are. In particular, the site is crowded with fans of anime, manga and [[Japan]]ese pop culture in general, which is very often a double-edged sword. While this has undoubtedly helped meritorious Japanese media gain recognition across the Pacific, it also led to the inclusion of works that are not all worthy of discussion due to their fetish-intensive porn nature. This caught the attention of the primary revenue source, Google AdSense who stopped the money. This caught the attention of the moderation staff pretty intensively.
+
Because the regulars of the editing staff tend to be unapologetic nerds, the content of the wiki veers in the direction of things that will mainly interest other nerds. While you will certainly find pages on more classical and conventional works like Victor Hugo's ''Les Miserables'' (both the book and the musical) and Machiavelli's ''The Prince'', the pages for geek interests like ''The [[Twilight Zone]]'' or the aforementioned ''Buffy'' are a lot more detailed, while many of the trope names are derived from such nerd favorites as ''Doctor Who'', ''Batman'' and ''[[Discworld]]''. Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on how much of a literary snob you are. In particular, the site is crowded with fans of anime, manga and [[Japan]]ese pop culture in general, which is very often a double-edged sword. While this has undoubtedly helped meritorious Japanese media gain recognition across the Pacific, it also led to the inclusion of works that are not at all worthy of discussion due to their fetish-intensive porn nature. This caught the attention of the primary revenue source, Google AdSense, who stopped the money. This caught the attention of the moderation staff pretty intensively.
  
 
A campaign to eliminate and lock those works from the wiki was mounted. An elected body was chosen to make the judgement call on whether a thing was disposable porn or not. Once again, there was a great hue and cry about how the dictatorial moderation staff were stifling the voices of freedom... and so on. This blew over in a few months, with those unable to bear working on a wiki that wouldn't have porn on it moving over to Wikia and forming their own "mirror" of TV Tropes. One with maybe 1% of the TV Tropes article count.
 
A campaign to eliminate and lock those works from the wiki was mounted. An elected body was chosen to make the judgement call on whether a thing was disposable porn or not. Once again, there was a great hue and cry about how the dictatorial moderation staff were stifling the voices of freedom... and so on. This blew over in a few months, with those unable to bear working on a wiki that wouldn't have porn on it moving over to Wikia and forming their own "mirror" of TV Tropes. One with maybe 1% of the TV Tropes article count.
  
 
==2012 Google rape crackdown==
 
==2012 Google rape crackdown==
In late June 2012, in response to repeated concerns from Google regarding having Google's advertising on a site that contained explicit content, TV Tropes initiated an indiscriminate purge of pages listed on the "Rape Tropes" index, attempting to remove or rename all tropes containing the word "rape" in the title. The wholesale removal of hundreds of pages containing valuable information on [[sexism]] and sexual harassment, while leaving more innocuously titled articles intact regardless of content, understandably resulted in an outcry among women and feminists, most notably Aja Romano of The Mary Sue.<ref>Romano, Aja. [http://www.themarysue.com/tv-tropes-rape-articles/ "TV Tropes Deletes Every Rape Trope; Geek Feminism Wiki Steps In."] ''The Mary Sue'', 26 June 2012.</ref>
+
In late June 2012, in response to repeated concerns from Google regarding having Google's advertising on a site that contained explicit content, TV Tropes initiated an indiscriminate purge of pages listed on the "Rape Tropes" index, attempting to remove or rename all tropes containing the word "rape" in the title. The removal of 12 pages containing valuable information on [[sexism]] and sexual harassment, while leaving more innocuously titled articles intact regardless of content, understandably resulted in an outcry from Aja Romano of The Mary Sue.<ref>Romano, Aja. [http://www.themarysue.com/tv-tropes-rape-articles/ "TV Tropes Deletes Every Rape Trope; Geek Feminism Wiki Steps In."] ''The Mary Sue'', 26 June 2012.</ref>
  
Following this outcry the deleted pages were restored, although efforts to clean the wiki continue.<ref>Romano, Aja. [http://www.themarysue.com/tv-tropes-restores-rape-tropes-but-disturbing-questions-remain/ "TV Tropes Restores Rape Tropes."] ''The Mary Sue'', 27 June 2012.</ref> Pages for pornography or other works with a heavy sexual focus are no longer accepted on the site; only a small number of works of historical or artistic value or notoriety (like ''A Serbian Film''<ref>[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/ASerbianFilm Film: ''A Serbian Film'']</ref>, the aforementioned ''Lolita'', and ''Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom''<ref>[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/SaloOrThe120DaysOfSodom Film: ''Salo Or The 120 Days Of Sodom'']</ref>) have been grandfathered in, and even they have had their pages permanently locked to prevent anybody from tampering with them.
+
Following this outcry the deleted pages were restored.<ref>Romano, Aja. [http://www.themarysue.com/tv-tropes-restores-rape-tropes-but-disturbing-questions-remain/ "TV Tropes Restores Rape Tropes."] ''The Mary Sue'', 27 June 2012.</ref> Pages for pornography or other works with a heavy sexual focus are no longer accepted on the site; only a small number of works of historical or artistic value or notoriety (like ''A Serbian Film''<ref>[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/ASerbianFilm Film: ''A Serbian Film'']</ref>, ''Lolita'', and ''Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom''<ref>[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/SaloOrThe120DaysOfSodom Film: ''Salo Or The 120 Days Of Sodom'']</ref>) have been grandfathered in, and even they have had their pages permanently locked to prevent anybody from tampering with them.
  
 
==See also==
 
==See also==
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Revision as of 05:15, 9 September 2013

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TV Tropes is a wiki whose mission is to catalogue and cross-reference recurrent cliches, plot devices, archetypes, and tropes in the media.

Contents

So what is TV Tropes anyway?

The wiki started out in 2004 on Buffistas.org, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan forum, as a fan-project to catalog said tropes from the Buffy television show by forum nerds. Because nerds have a diverse set of interests, it then spread to encompass all TV shows and then all media. Hence the outdated name.[1]

The website grew extremely quickly around 2009-10, when it started to circulate the Internet and its userbase grew past the original collection of Buffy and Joss Whedon fans, with websites like xkcd[2] and Cracked[3] plugging it. The Whedon-verse is a property that thrives on snark and witty dialog, which the fans love it for, so at first TV Tropes peppered its articles with a snarky point of view. Alas, anyone who has been longer on the Internet for more than one Planck time knows that many (or at least the most vocal) Internet nerds tend to get extremely sensitive and hysterical at any snark or parody towards their favorite works.

To stifle the edit wars, the site asked that all "review-like" material be moved to the Reviews section and that the main articles be as free as possible from judgment calls. Naturally, some people received this as an attack on their opinions, being unable to cope with the subtle complexities of moving the opinions to a different page. Eventually, though, the editors caught on that they were still entitled to say whatever they might like about a work, as long as it was in the right place.

The site has a "no such thing as notability" policy.[4] The policy allows some aspiring artists with more ego than talent to use TV Tropes as a vehicle for plugging their own fanfiction, webcomics and (often self-published) books, which tend to vary wildly in quality but usually fall on the wrong end of Sturgeon's Law. After all, those sheeple need to see the beauty in my masterpiece Hot Nite In 2 Boobz where my author avatar original Pokemon Dong-ichu saves the world with gangsta rap!

To be fair, it's not always a complete and total waste of time. In fact, it has a well-deserved reputation for being a highly addicting browser narcotic that can suck you in for hours at a time.[2] If you stick to titles with at least some degree of recognition outside the more insane fandoms, most of the site's contents won't seem too out of the ordinary and you may actually come across some quality snark. As should be obvious, the more you gravitate towards things that only the desperately depraved or psychotic could ever love, the more craziness and creepiness you're in for.

Regularly visiting the website will make you a lot more keen and aware of the various tools, cliches and story structures that are used in fictional works. It is a matter of debate whether this generates a greater appreciation of media, or if it just makes one more cynical about it. TV Tropes itself jokingly alludes to this tendency, claiming that the site will ruin your life[5] and, by extension, your vocabulary[6] as you start seeing tropes in everything you read, watch or play, and even start using trope terms like "lampshading," "your mileage may vary" and "anvilicious" in your everyday speech.

Because the regulars of the editing staff tend to be unapologetic nerds, the content of the wiki veers in the direction of things that will mainly interest other nerds. While you will certainly find pages on more classical and conventional works like Victor Hugo's Les Miserables (both the book and the musical) and Machiavelli's The Prince, the pages for geek interests like The Twilight Zone or the aforementioned Buffy are a lot more detailed, while many of the trope names are derived from such nerd favorites as Doctor Who, Batman and Discworld. Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on how much of a literary snob you are. In particular, the site is crowded with fans of anime, manga and Japanese pop culture in general, which is very often a double-edged sword. While this has undoubtedly helped meritorious Japanese media gain recognition across the Pacific, it also led to the inclusion of works that are not at all worthy of discussion due to their fetish-intensive porn nature. This caught the attention of the primary revenue source, Google AdSense, who stopped the money. This caught the attention of the moderation staff pretty intensively.

A campaign to eliminate and lock those works from the wiki was mounted. An elected body was chosen to make the judgement call on whether a thing was disposable porn or not. Once again, there was a great hue and cry about how the dictatorial moderation staff were stifling the voices of freedom... and so on. This blew over in a few months, with those unable to bear working on a wiki that wouldn't have porn on it moving over to Wikia and forming their own "mirror" of TV Tropes. One with maybe 1% of the TV Tropes article count.

2012 Google rape crackdown

In late June 2012, in response to repeated concerns from Google regarding having Google's advertising on a site that contained explicit content, TV Tropes initiated an indiscriminate purge of pages listed on the "Rape Tropes" index, attempting to remove or rename all tropes containing the word "rape" in the title. The removal of 12 pages containing valuable information on sexism and sexual harassment, while leaving more innocuously titled articles intact regardless of content, understandably resulted in an outcry from Aja Romano of The Mary Sue.[7]

Following this outcry the deleted pages were restored.[8] Pages for pornography or other works with a heavy sexual focus are no longer accepted on the site; only a small number of works of historical or artistic value or notoriety (like A Serbian Film[9], Lolita, and Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom[10]) have been grandfathered in, and even they have had their pages permanently locked to prevent anybody from tampering with them.

See also

External links

Footnotes

  1. Something that they themselves take note of, or "lampshade" in trope-speak, on their "Network Decay" page (under the "Websites" section).
  2. 2.0 2.1 xkcd #609: Tab Explosion
  3. Cracked.com: TV Tropes
  4. Seriously. They actually call it by that name.
  5. TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life
  6. TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Vocabulary
  7. Romano, Aja. "TV Tropes Deletes Every Rape Trope; Geek Feminism Wiki Steps In." The Mary Sue, 26 June 2012.
  8. Romano, Aja. "TV Tropes Restores Rape Tropes." The Mary Sue, 27 June 2012.
  9. Film: A Serbian Film
  10. Film: Salo Or The 120 Days Of Sodom


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