TV Tropes/Memes

"They wanted to play "memes" with the old school. Now there are tears."

- Fast Eddie

Describe TV Tropes here.

Okay, but it'll be really hard.

...

That's What She Said.

Want further proof that Tropes Will Ruin Your Life? Just take a look at all of the Egregious memes that they've spawned. Don't worry... you'll eventually start using these in time.

Since these are in-jokes, you'd be hard-pressed to find them outside of TV Tropes (or All The Tropes, since we started with a fork of TVT), but within, they are memetic.

Naturally, many of these are Repeatedly Used On This Very Wiki. (Including that one.)

(If you are unfamiliar with some of these, you probably never visited the TVT forums. Not That There's Anything Wrong with That.)

-- "Statler: Say, why is it that we always have to show up at the end of these articles? Waldorf: Simple! They wouldn't shut up otherwise! Both: Do-Ho-Ho-Ho-Hoh!"
 * Tropes can be considered as memes in and on themselves.
 * Referring to The Other Wiki as such.
 * A YKTTW meme occurs when someone makes a blank post, after which people start complaining that we already have Dada Comics, and supplying examples of the proposed trope in various media (inevitably including John Cage's 4:33). This is because the YKTTW for Dada Comics was actually started this way.
 * Look no further than Wild Mass Guessing: Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory and Altair, who kills everything. Everyone is also a Time Lord and Haruhi Suzumiya, and living inside the subconscious of both Tommy Westphall and Shinji Ikari.
 * Martin Van Buren really was a Time Lord.
 * Look. No. Further. William "Bootstrap Bill" Turner IS A TIME LORD. Who makes EVERYONE THEIR TARDIS on TV Tropes!
 * Also, everyone is Ash's father. Who I have heard really gets around.
 * As an extension, everyone will start beeping in 57 minutes.
 * And Spiral Energy and Shinigami are the gears that make it work.
 * They're only a Time Lord if you can say what their TARDIS is. For example, Fast Eddie is a Time Lord, and TV Tropes is his TARDIS.
 * This wiki also spawned a minor memetic mutation regarding the game Prey. After Nezumi casually pointed out the significant usage of sphincters and sphincter-like structures in the Womb Level portions of Prey, it's become a running gag to make references to sphincters any time it's mentioned on the wiki. At one point, the Sphere the game takes place in was referred to in an entry as "the sphinctership."
 * Trope Name Injokes.
 * On my deathbed, I will whisper, "(old name for renamed trope)".
 * "Rape The Dog." I sincerely hope no one confuses this for my dying wish.
 * Crowning Moment of Awesome has become a recognizable meme in certain corners of the Internet.
 * Linkara mentioned it.
 * And, to a lesser extent, Dethroning Moment of Suck.
 * Probably hit critical mass when it was used for a gag in Shortpacked!
 * Exceeded critical mass when an article in Esquire was called "TV's Crowning Moments of Awesome."
 * As the one who started the whole CMOA thing in the first place, Weaver is fully aware that they have created a monster and is happier about it than they probably should be.
 * Due to fortunate Clothing Damage in the Fantastic Four movies, they have come to the conclusion that even the laws of physics want to see Jessica Alba naked.
 * (Abortion of reality that will haunt every waking moment or your dreams). You're welcome.
 * X Ensues. It's not always hilarity.
 * Hilarity Ensues could kind of count on its own; a lot of times it's mentioned, hilarity does, in fact, ensue.
 * Pothole-ing to Hilarity Ensues in cases of extreme violence.
 * "troll post removed". (On the forums, anyway)
 * Also on the forums: This post was thumped by the Stick of Off-Topic Thumping.
 * As a discussion involving trope names progresses, the probability of one of the following tropes being mentioned approaches one:
 * Meganekko
 * Jonas Quinn
 * Rape The Dog
 * Also, in the "page history" sections, "Rape the Dog is dead".
 * The Perfect Trumpet Thingy from the Courage the Cowardly Dog Nightmare Fuel pages is becoming a memetic nightmare-giver. Any Trope including nightmares, surrealism, or it's very image alone will result in SOMEONE commenting how scary it is.
 * The name is also a TV Tropes brand nickname.
 * After the TV Tropes Wiki Drinking Game noted the popularity of the word "Egregious" on the Wiki, someone decided the Pothole the next instance of "egregious" they wrote to that very drinking game. Before long, half the instances of "egregious" were linked there. This was eventually taken to its logical conclusion: "Egregious" was created, first as a redirect to the TV Tropes Wiki Drinking Game, and then as its own page. The word has also crept into trope titles, such as The Egregious Trope-Man (which has now been renamed The Adjectival Superhero).
 * Describe Meme here. It's a phrase that gets repeated until repeating it is an end in itself.
 * Even though Describe Topic Here has been replaced with "Click the edit button to start this new page", this meme is still used for self-demonstrating openings to articles, and "Click the edit button..." hasn't escaped this fate either.
 * The Advertisement Server is TV Tropes' own Memetic Badass. Or at least, Memetic Wiseass. Giving Made Of Wins to said server became so popular, it got its own honorary contributor page and a separate TV Tropes Made of Win Archive section just for it, dubbed Made of Win.
 * Xanatos and Light Yagami planned EVERYTHING.
 * Ciaphas Cain, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!
 * Captain Gordon, Defender of Earth!
 * Also, always write DAN GREEN!!! and Brian Blessed in capital letters (especially the latter!)
 * Let's not forget Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer!
 * Any sentence... which... mentions... William Shatner... must be riddled... with... dramatic pauses.
 * Ace Rimmer (what a guy!).
 * Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann always being emphasized.
 * The phrase 'loli rape bunker' has become popular after being used in a thread on the forums about a German/Swiss Hikikomori Otaku who bought a bunker to store all his loli rape Doujinshi in, so that he could fap all the way through Armaggeddon. Disturbingly yet hilariously, many people on the forum have now changed their user location to say 'loli rape bunker' or a variation thereof.
 * On the forums, sex-related derails, sometimes described as "Tropers Are Horny Bastards". Forced derails tend to take the form of references to orange juice and Diablo II, following an attempt to derail the Fetishes thread.
 * The phrase "TAKE THAT SHIT TO FETISHES" has become a meme itself, whenever someone thinks that a sex related derail is imminent.
 * Every thread will eventually derail into discussions about sex, Neon Genesis Evangelion, or Haruhi. No exceptions. One of these things is not found in a brothel...
 * You forgot Joss Whedon works.
 * Hell, "No exceptions" is a meme in itself.
 * And Neon Genesis Evangelion has since given way to Touhou, and then Homestuck.
 * In the Skyrim thread, 'acid sacks' (from a discussion about Weird Argonian Biology), and 'wrong ears' (The Dark Elves' ears apparently point the wrong direction in Skyrim).
 * Wild Mass Guessing that actually makes sense. Crazy, I know.
 * Blatantly canon guess
 * That's ridiculous/you'll need more proof than that.
 * Tropers often refer to themselves in the third person: "This Troper". Not to be confused with "That Troper". The jocular "This Vigilante Taxonomist" is also occasionally seen, in reference to a forum thread in which a user accused Tropers of being vigilante taxonomists. Note that doing either this or referring to yourself in the first person has been strongly discouraged on the wiki for quite a while now.
 * Also, Report Siht.
 * IMDB never lies.
 * Except when it does.
 * On the forums: Fedora fedora fedora.
 * Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich.
 * "Hey, what anime should I watch?" TwinPeaks.
 * Other forum memes include fire, "Akufen -- The Dragonfly Who Thought He Was A Mockingbird" and "".
 * Plus the Reispin meme. Now the tripped-out Rei face is a forum-symbol for both the Just for Fun subforum and, as one troper put it, "Descents into stygian madness."
 * Which originally took [[media:Reispinwin.jpg|this form]].
 * Now in Homestuck Flavor!
 * Madoka Magica Edition!
 * Honor Harrington is Horatio Hornblower...
 * Arguably TV Tropes ruining people's lives has become a meme itself. It's been mentioned on xkcd, and other miscellaneous sites
 * Haven is the Main Character of Real Life.
 * HAY ZUDAK
 * LET'S HAVE HAWT, NASTY SEX THAT VIOLATES EVERY LAW OF PHYSICS. LITERALLY.
 * Which, of course, spawned: HAY [AOD], HAY CELEBRAIN, HAY AONDEUG, HAY IS FOR HORSES, NEEDLE, HAY HAY HAY, HAY RIDLEY, HAY GUYZ, and a few others. A few of them (the big ones) were actually saved by the Troper, Pacific, and made downloadable so that we could save this piece of craziness for posterity, after they got deleted.
 * "I Am Not Making This Up" used to be a meme, but it got so overused that it ended up as a Discredited Meme. We now call it "The Phrase That Shall Not Be Potholed".
 * Similarly, saying "X does not exist" while potholing to Discontinuity was once a meme, but became discredited after being overused and widely agreed to be irritating. The split into Fanon Discontinuity and Canon Discontinuity sealed the meme's fate.
 * During the short-lived movie nights on the forums, it was popular to accuse various objects in the movies of being SNAKES! This started during the Snakes on a Plane movie night, when the tropers realized that it took the movie around 30 minutes to show a single snake.
 * THIS ARTICLE IS SNAKES!
 * In Doctor Who recaps, it's comm-WOOOOOOOOSSSSSSSH. For some inexplicable reason.
 * On the forum, any sentence saying "Thanks to this post of mine, you now know something that you didn't know before!" is likely potholed to And Knowing Is Half the Battle.
 * Putting "I came here from TV Tropes" at comment section of any Youtube video is becoming this.
 * It's the top-rated comment for this video, with (at time of writing) about 300 votes, linked from So Unfunny It's Funny.
 * This video is linked from Bound and Gagged, and almost every comment mentions TV Tropes. It's now reached a critical mass, and newer comments express surprise that every comment really does mention TV Tropes.
 * Warhammer 40,000 is becoming a trope of its own, usually related to Beyond the Impossible and Darker and Edgier Grimdark.
 * I hate memes from the fora too. Fuck that guy.
 * Marking that a trope is being egregiously used within a work by adding the phrase "And how!" as description to an example, usually with some kind of misplaced italics. Further repetitive use of the same tropes will lead to a promotion to "but of COURSE!"
 * Samuel L. Jackson, while only having one arm, beat up the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, and forced him to provide the Deus Ex Machina ending. This was cut from the final print of the movie because it was so awesome, test audiences' heads kept on exploding.
 * Too Soon!
 * Every time exploding heads are mentioned, it's imperative to mention Darryl Revok.
 * Fungal sacs.
 * (insert controversial statement) Your Mileage May Vary.
 * Hello. My Name Is Inigo Montoya. You Killed My Father. Prepare to Die.
 * To elaborate, Hello was made specifically because it was the only part of that quote that wasn't in blue.
 * Hey, It's That Guy!: *character's name* is *name of other characters that the actor has played with hotlinks to series that those characters are from*.
 * Putting in spoiler tags. Don't want to spoil the ending for all you Protestants out there.
 * Or that.
 * Looking for the latest Anime or some sweet music? Whatever you do, make sure to obtain it through Perfectly Legal Means!
 * Please, no Complaining About Memes You Don't Like on this page.
 * Your Mileage May Vary, as the work was very polarizing.
 * It's THE GREAT MOTHERFUCKING PUMPKIN!
 * I'm surprised nobody has mentioned being surprised about something nobody has mentioned yet yet.
 * There's a person, of all people, who was in a show, of all shows, who used this meme, of all memes, where they show that they show that it is surprising, of all emotions, that this was an example of a trope, of all things.
 * Don't forget "Not to mention", and lest we forget something you've never heard of.
 * Cpt. Louis Renault is shocked - shocked - to see that gambling is going on in here.
 * Man Without A Body started using the phrase "That is all" for examples that were Self Explanatory or exactly what they said on the tin. The whole thing was done with quite a John Hodgman influence, as it's one of his catch phrases. The phrase has spread a bit across the wiki.
 * The page on Left Fielder had become just a place for endless Memetic Mutation of whatever you want, until the examples were cut.
 * You Fail X Forever, leading to the Laconic entry: X DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY! GOODNIGHT!
 * From the now-defunct Troper Tales:
 * Anecdotes would draw the response "Are you me?" from the like-minded and "will you marry me?" from those who liked what they read.
 * "[Character/Person] causes this type of Fetish Fuel, which concerns this otherwise entirely straight [same gender] troper who isn't into that in Real Life."
 * The fact that in the TV Tropes Nightmare Fuel page, it's revealed that Brother-Sister Incest once had an (empty) Troper Tales page, as if somebody was expecting it to be filled in at some point.
 * An X that is so overflowing with memes that it needs its own section.
 * Pot holing to a different article with every word in a sentence or phrase.
 * Thanks to the forum wordfilter, variations on the phrase "Sorry, I skipped some posts." are now common. Less widely used is "I am too lazy, or possibly too incapable, to actually read anything. I resent the fact that this makes me seem like an inconsiderate person and hereby pledge to resume taking my ADHD medication."
 * Fast Eddie will shut that shit down.
 * Do you think he is playing?
 * Say, have you tried Tou-* shot*
 * Another forum meme: A while ago, a troll spammed some boards with topics titled "Why is X", where X is typically a minority group or religion or something. After his banning, "Why is?" rose to prominence.
 * Image caption: [Character] shows us how it's done.
 * Bonus points for awarding points to your entries.
 * [[media:Topic_make_me_make_this_face.png|Topic make me make this face.]] * image of Osaka staring blankly*
 * TV Tropes is practically the poster child for this.
 * In the case of FATAL, any discussion about the "game"'s Chaos Magic will eventually lead to jokes about summoning "randy gay ogres".
 * If not that, then stabs at Byron Hall's claims of "historical accuracy" will be met with screams of REALISM! Often corrupted: REALISTIANALCIRCUMFRENCE!
 * Also, whenever the eponymous spell--which kills everything in the game's universe--comes up, it is inevitably referred to as a Mercy Kill or otherwise being for the best.
 * It's cloaca time!
 * An example of a trope taken "to its logical conclusion/extreme" or "Up to Eleven", which is often a trope exaggerated or lasts longer than would really be necessary. One example being "what if a tsundere character stayed tsundere, even after growing up, marrying, and having a child?"
 * He broke 33 pencils in his life, and had a good friend break two of those pencils because they were too hard.
 * When Large Hams are mentioned, there will be allusions to different kinds of pork-based foodstuffs, and quite often related puns on actor/character names.
 * And scenery ingestion wordplay.
 * Referring to your overly cuddly bisexual friend as OCBF.
 * TV Tropes misspelled as TV Trops. You've probably done it at least once.
 * Pot Hole... to.. THIS TROPE!
 * Every time a programming problem in the wiki happens, when Fast Eddie fixes it, he is being fast as usual.
 * (I knew who made this thread) "Before I even clicked on it!"
 * Indeed.
 * Variations on the phrase "FUCK the SHIT out of her" have become popular on the It Just Bugs Me! forum.
 * TV Tropes is a buttload more informal.
 * Fake Potholes on Fora.
 * It seems like every time TV Tropes crashed, it went "bork" or "was borked".
 * So who came from the {enter tvtropes page here} page on tvtropes?
 * So who came from the {enter subpage within tvtropes page here} subpage of the {enter tvtropes page here} page on tvtropes?
 * (YouTube) Featured on TV Tropes!
 * P. Diddy caused everything evil in the world. He's now to evil what Altair is to death.
 * Linking to TV Tropes from an outside site will inevitably spawn comments along the lines of "Whatever plans I had to do anything productive today have pretty much been shot all to hell now."
 * Also "Don't click this link" or "Click if you dare" are common.
 * "Must...not...click..on...trope...link."
 * "Is it God Knows...?" An illegal guess in the Anime Theme Song Game, where you have to guess the OP/ED ("God Knows" is an insert song).
 * "Are there aliens/time travellers/espers?" Evidently, Haruhi's search criteria work pretty well in-game.
 * Trope Name: The Movie (or This is practically Trope Name: The Movie!) as an alternative to Trope Codifier (usually cos it's taken).
 * Too bad. Waluigi Time.
 * NOT UNPOPULAR!
 * Originally a response to Opinion Myopia in the "Unpopular Opinions" threads at the forum. Has since spread to memetic uses elsewhere.
 * "You needed to know this." A meme from the forum's "Trash Heap" thread.
 * Full stop, full stop.
 * Whenever there's a link to something scary and/or disturbing someone is likely to write: "Yeah right, as if X could be really that bad-HOLY SHIT ." or anything similar.
 * If a character is named Fate (e.g. in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha), claiming that the trope You Can't Fight Fate refers to that character and listing examples (Jail Scaglietti) and exceptions to the rule (Nanoha).
 * In the Fan Fic recs pages, the Sturgeon's Law phrase "The remaining ten percent is worth dying for," is replaced by something more suitable for the fandom. For example, "I'm commander Shepard and these are my favorite Fan Fictions on the internet." or The Remaining ten percent is worth getting tanged for. Or even "Proof that the remaining ten percent is worth being sent to the moon for.
 * "My head is full of fuck."
 * [Insert Trope Here]: And how!
 * [Name], Just [Name]
 * alternately: [Name}, Oh dear God [Name]!
 * Also Truth in Television!.
 * Anywhere else, "Me Me" is the sign of an Attention Whore. On TV Tropes, it's a Memetic Mutation.