TV Tropes



Affectionately known as The Other Tropes Wiki, TV Tropes is a wiki documenting, in a fairly informal manner, the various conventions of fiction. They're quite similar to All The Tropes, but have a few differences.

Like any sizeable work, they've collected their own fair share of tropes.


 * Abomination Accusation Attack: Fast Eddie and the pre-sale administration of TVT routinely accused anyone who disagreed with the censorship regime they imposed in middle-to-late 2012 of being a pedophile or wanting to use the wiki to disseminate "pedoshit".
 * Accentuate the Negative: Darth Wiki.
 * And Stay Out!: Frequently seen in 2012, when various wiki contributors made it known they were leaving because they did not approve of the measures the wiki management had chosen to impose in the wake of The Second Google Incident. Fast Eddie or other staff would routinely lock the accounts of such departing users and blank their troper pages as "punishment" for quitting the wiki.
 * Fast Eddie's abrupt and unilateral change of TV Tropes' license from Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-BY-SA) to the incompatible Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA) within days of learning that the wiki content had been scraped and forked in early July 2012 can also be seen as an example of this trope. It did nothing to undo the fork or stop competing wikis from using the legally-acquired content -- it was nothing more than a "door slam" whose only purpose was to give Fast Eddie the illusion that he had any control over the situation at all.
 * Artifact Title: It started with TV (Buffy the Vampire Slayer in particular). Nowadays it encompasses all media, insofar as their need for ad revenue allows them to.
 * Artistic License Law: Fighteer's belief that casually adding a non-negotiable, unilateral (and implicitly retroactive) claim to all contributors' copyrights to the TVT Admninistrivia page in 2012 was both legal and an appropriate response to contributor questions about their license status. Fortunately, the new management actually consulted a real lawyer about this in 2015 and backpedaled on it so quickly they left skid marks.
 * Beige Prose: The Laconic pages.
 * Big Lie: Fast Eddie and his allies' efforts to convince TVT users that All The Tropes and other legally-forked troping wikis somehow constituted Plagiarism, that they were Troll sites, and their staff and users focused on salacious material to the exclusion of all else.  Even years after the sale of the site and Fast Eddie's departure, the remaining staff has done little to correct the misapprehensions of those users who believed Fast Eddie's accusations except where forced to by the new management's explicit policy of cooperation with ATT.
 * Blatant Lies: Many users have since come to regard statements concerning users' ability to "disagree with the site's editorial or administrative policies" as this.
 * Oh, that's perfectly true. You're only banned from the wiki if you admit it.
 * When your editing rights are removed, the message you get once you try to edit a page claims it's not a punishment when it's anything but one as it prevents a person from contributing even if the only reason given is them having consistently having minor mistakes that makes their stuff look "not neat", pointing this lie out will bring harsher punishment like a total site ban or more childishly in one example forcing the person to redirect to google when they try to access the site.
 * Breaking the Fourth Wall/Leaning on the Fourth Wall: An editor of the site will often introduce themselves as "This Troper". This is frowned upon for examples, though.
 * Censorship Bureau: The P5, who were formed in the aftermath of Google revoking their ads for the second time. Their job is to keep the wiki clean from porn sanitized so that Google Ads will keep paying out.
 * Dark World: Darth Wiki.
 * Darker and Edgier:
 * The Useful Notes sections, detailing more darker facets about reality than fiction.
 * Of course, there's also Darth Wiki, where all the negative opinions go to, though since the wiki has been trying to purge as much negativity as possible, even the Darth Wiki has been severely pruned over time.
 * Deader Than Dead: The moderation staff have made it clear that some pages will always remain salted (i.e. cut and locked). These pages are known as the Permanent Red Link Club.
 * Death of the Author: Strongly underlies the philosophy of troping as defined by the site.
 * Drinking Game: They have one, which we inherited.
 * Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Some of the trope titles, and increasing every day. These are listed in the Index of Exact Trope Titles.
 * Guilt Trip: As of 2021, TV Tropes detects some forms of ad-blocking and automatically displays banners reading "This is page #X you have viewed this month without ads.  We get it, ads aren't what you're here for, but they do pay for the hosting and maintenance of TV Tropes. Please whitelist us or purchase an ad-free pass to support TV Tropes."  (This is a considerable improvement over a previous tactic, which was to refuse to show any content whatsoever until you relented and disabled your ad-blocking.)
 * Hive Mind: A conscious goal. At one point, the Ask The Tropers page description was "Appeals to the troper hivemind".
 * Hurricane of Puns:
 * Just read the Just for Pun index.
 * The Sorting Algorithm of Tropes index qualifies, although the puns will likely slip under your radar if you don't have a computer science background.
 * Lampshade Hanging: For pages about tropes, there will a folder section for TV Tropes, lampshading how TV Tropes uses the trope explained on the page in some fashion. Very meta. Even more meta is the logo. Which is the Lampshade.
 * Lighter and Softer: Sugar Wiki, where all the positive opinions go to.
 * Medium Awareness: References to how the site is a wiki are constantly referenced.
 * Metasyntactic Variable: TV Tropes had at one time a practice of using the word "trope" as a Metasyntactic Variable in trope names, such as The Trope Kid, Disney Owns This Trope and The Von Trope Family. They began discouraging this practice well before the fork leading to ATT took place, and many such names were later replaced, but a few still linger there and here.
 * Mind Screw: At least half the entries in Wild Mass Guessing.
 * Moe Anthropomorphism: Trope-tan -- and her little dog, too.
 * Moral Guardians: On the one hand, they deny it, but on the other, the placeholders initially placed for deleted work pages like Pokegirls make it very clear they were deleted out of administrator outrage or disapproval of their content, not for any other reason.  Works apparently must meet a minimum moral standard in order to be worthy of the honor of a TV Tropes page.
 * The Moral Substitute: In the wake of the Second Google incident, the administration cast its efforts to purge itself of revenue-threatening content as turning TV Tropes into the Moral Substitute for itself.  In the years following, it's also managed to convince at least a part of its user base that All The Tropes and other forked troping wikis are run by perverts who focus on salacious material to the exclusion of anything else.
 * Orwellian Editor:
 * The moderation staff routinely deletes anything they don't like or which dares to disagree with their opinions. (They also delete those who do the disagreeing.) Entire threads have been known to vanish when the subject matter ventures into areas that the mods simply don't want discussed. They are aided in this by PMWiki's bare-minimum history feature, which retains little more than the last couple dozen edits (let alone a full audit trail back to the page creator), and which provides no simple mechanism for restoring deletions.
 * During Fast Eddie's tenure as admin, forum threads that criticized him or his wiki ended up nuked, meaning that anyone who tried to access it would be redirected to a blank page. Eddie wasn't the only one with nuke powers, though - the moderators themselves had the ability to nuke threads, and took full advantage of these.
 * Overused Running Gag: I Am Not Making This Up and So Yeah were so overused that the wiki said "Enough is enough!" and purged all mention of them from the wiki, deleting and perma-locking their pages.
 * Poe's Law: Has very visibly fallen victim to it. During The Second Google Incident, several works were cutlisted by members in protest to say "This zero-tolerance policy will likely cut this". While obvious ultrafamous works like Romeo and Juliet had little risk, Black Bird ended up being cut for real.  (It was restored afterwards -- one of the few times the TVT Censorship Bureau has ever admitted to a mistake without intense, embarrassing media scrutiny first.)
 * Post Modern: Plenty of examples. Since the site is a catalog of devices used in fiction, the whole site is this.
 * Punny Name: Quite a few article titles.
 * Rant-Inducing Slight: An August 2015 article on Cracked.com deftly skewered TVT for the more ridiculous, tone-deaf and flat-out disturbing "Real Life" examples that show up on trope pages (some of which, we will admit, we have inherited and still have lurking about on ATT). TVT's user base decided that they had been "betrayed" by Cracked.com and all but declared war on the website.
 * Reasonable Authority Figures: The new owners of TV Tropes, Drew and Chris, have proven themselves to be this from the start.
 * Running Gag: Several, most commonly "Tropes Will Ruin Your Life".
 * Schmuck Bait: A lot of external links are this. Notable offenders:
 * Ear Worm: Prepare to be hearing the piece of music from that link for the rest of the day.
 * Rickroll: Do we really need to explain this one?
 * Screw the Rules, I Make Them: Fast Eddie's sole guiding principle during his final years as owner of the site, starting with the Second Google Incident.  A good case in point: when he established the P5 he expressly reserved the right to overrule them and delete something he didn't like even if they felt it was "safe" for the site, just because he didn't like it -- while holding up the P5 as having the "final authority" over wiki content.
 * Seen It All: Read the site enough and take it too seriously, and you may become this.
 * Self-Demonstrating Article: A whole index of them.
 * Sex Is Evil: In the immediate aftermath of The Second Google Incident, this became official administrative policy -- any work that did not treat sex as something shameful to be ignored or hidden in the shadows lost the honored privilege of a page there.  Since the change in ownership, however, this attitude appears to have been relaxed somewhat -- at least as far as Google Ads will let them.
 * "Stop Having Fun!" Guys: More than a few of the admins and mods, although with the late-2014 change in ownership, this may change.
 * There also appeared to be a clique of tropers who for some years actively patrolled the Made of Win pages specifically to find things to delete.
 * Sugar Bowl: What the "no negativity" directive strives to make the entire wiki.
 * Theme Naming: Their trope-naming "organizations", SPOON, FORKS, KNIVES, and PLATTER, were all named after kitchen utensils.
 * There Is No Kill Like Overkill: A few years ago, TV Tropes happily handed out permabans to anyone who criticized them. Disagree with the administration of the site? Well, then enjoy getting a permanent ban and being redirected to Google every single time you try to access it.
 * Think of the Advertisers!: The primary motivation for the content purge in the wake of the Second Google Incident.
 * Thrown Down a Well: The Permanent Red Link Club, used for tropes that are deleted and locked to make sure that they could never return.
 * Tropes Will Ruin Your Life: You thought we were kidding?
 * Visual Pun: Some of the images for their trope articles are this.
 * Wiki Walk: It's a wiki, what else would you expect?
 * Wimpification: The evolution of TVT from a free-wheeling New Media entity open to every possible point of view into a site so thin-skinned and unable to bear a single word of criticism, from either within or without, that it will casually deny the very existence of the critic -- and bans its own users for even mentioning them.


 * Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick
 * Broken Base: The Trope Repair Shop forums, where decisions are made to rename/split/merge a trope.
 * Captain Obvious
 * Comically Missing the Point: There is a substantial fraction of TV Tropes' users who participate only in the forums and judge  presence on the site as a whole solely by presence there.  Prolific wiki contributors who never bother with the forums can be written off as having "left the site" by these users.
 * Continuity Nod
 * Conversational Troping: Pretty much the original intention of the forums. It quickly outgrew that.
 * Crowning Moment of Funny: The Made Of Forum Win topic.
 * Deadpan Snarker
 * Double Entendre
 * Dysfunction Junction
 * Fan Myopia
 * Freud Was Right
 * GIRL: There is an overwhelming amount of male members with female avatars. This is inverted frequently as well, with plenty of females sporting male avatars.
 * Hurricane of Puns
 * Hot-Blooded
 * Left Fielder
 * Loads and Loads of Characters
 * Memetic Mutation: By the bucketload. Fast Eddie wasn't a fan.
 * The Moral Substitute: For any tropes wiki which does not censor its content.
 * Multinational Team
 * Nightmare Fetishist
 * Nightmare Fuel
 * Ninja Editors: The forum tends to move fast. It is not uncommon for threads to gain two or three posts in less than a minute.
 * Online Personas: Most of 'em.
 * Running Gag
 * Serious Business
 * Shipping
 * Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Pretty idealistic, as far as places on the Internet go.
 * Sock Puppets
 * Sugar Bowl: Enforced selectively on the forums, where thread participants who agree with moderators on the topic at hand are more likely to get away with rudeness toward those who disagree with the moderators than vice versa, at least for hot-button topics.
 * Talkative Loons
 * Thread Necromancer
 * Tropes Will Ruin Your Life: No, we weren't kidding. Some forum posters often experience this as well, sometimes taken to the extreme.
 * Universal Adaptor Cast: There sure are a lot of troper AUs.
 * Viewer Gender Confusion: Not helped by the GIRL (and reverse-GIRL) avatars, and the fact that gender doesn't come up much.
 * Yaoi Fans
 * Yuri Fans