TV Tropes



Affectionately known on All The Tropes as "The Other Tropes Wiki", TV Tropes is a wiki documenting the various conventions of fiction in a fairly informal manner, and the origin of All The Tropes as a fork.

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


 * Abomination Accusation Attack: As part of what had led to the Second Google Incident was an influx of lolicon content (removal of which was commented on and praised by Fuck No TVTropes), removing anything perceived as such was the explicit stated aim of the P5 acronym as it was initially conceived. However, when those efforts overstepped their bounds it got to the point where Fast Eddie and the pre-sale administration of TVT routinely accused anyone who disagreed with it of being a pedophile or wanting to use the wiki to disseminate "pedoshit".
 * Accentuate the Negative: Darth Wiki.
 * Ad Dissonance: TV Tropes's ads are documented by Ad of Win and Ad of Lose at opposite ends of the spectrum.
 * 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: TV Tropes started with Buffy the Vampire Slayer in particular before expanding to television, and then to all forms of media.
 * Artistic License Law:
 * Fast Eddie's contention after the fork that Creative Commons was "a license to plagiarize".
 * Fighteer's belief that casually adding a non-negotiable, unilateral (and implicitly retroactive) claim to all contributors' copyrights to the TVT Admninistrivia page in 2013 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 - even so, both this and the license changes previously discussed (see And Stay Out! above) have caused All The Tropes in particular to adopt a strict anti-plagiarism policy that disallows copying from TV Tropes unless the editor in question is importing changes that they (and they alone) made.
 * Author Appeal:
 * TV Tropes spawned from a fan-site for a Joss Whedon TV series, and many tropes like Big Damn Heroes can be traced back to Whedon's work (which is one of the many influences All The Tropes inherited).
 * TV Tropes really liked The Nostalgia Critic and its spin-offs once upon the time. As the Colbert Bump pages notes, it took only an hour after his All Dogs Go to Heaven review was posted for the Non Sequitur Scene page to be created (under the name inspired by the review, "Big-Lipped Alligator Moment").
 * BlazBlue was pretty over-represented on their Pantheon (basically a place for users to gush about their favorite characters) even by the standards of a surprisingly-popular mix of Fighting Game and Visual Novel.
 * Beige Prose: The Laconic pages.
 * Berserk Button: Probably easier to list what isn't one.
 * Big Lie: The efforts made by the Fast Eddie-headed administration 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 can be considered this.
 * Blatant Lies: Many users have since come to regard Second Google Incident-era statements concerning users' ability to "disagree with the site's editorial or administrative policies" as this.
 * 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 both there and on here.
 * Censorship Bureau:
 * The P5, who were formed in the aftermath of Google revoking their ads for the second time, gained a reputation for this due to overzealousness (both perceived and otherwise) in trying to restore their status with Google Ads, and still retain this reputation well after the fact among much of the Broken Base that resulted.
 * Played For Laughs with their Ad Of Lose Darth Wiki page, which hosts anecdotes about inappropriate or strangely-placed ads that occur with the site's advertisement server.


 * Dark World: Darth Wiki.
 * Darker and Edgier:
 * In years prior, the Useful Notes sections often focused on detailing the darker facets of reality.
 * Of course there's also Darth Wiki, where several negative opinions and similarly-inclined content is placed or "contained" go.
 * 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.
 * Drinking Game: They have one, which we inherited.
 * Everyone Has Standards: For all that users on the anti-TVT side of the Broken Base have complained about the site in the years following the split, practically no one mourns the loss of the Troper Tales section that didn't already have a significant Bile Fascination.
 * 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: Like several other sites on the modern web, TV Tropes circa 2021 detected some forms of ad-blocking and automatically displayed 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 - both of which are symptoms of the aforementioned larger internet-wide trend where various websites attempt to maintain their ad revenue.
 * 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.
 * Interface Spoiler: Thanks to the seemingly arbitrary criteria in how character sheets are created and who deserves one, TV Tropes often spoils that a new character is not really new by not giving it a separated character sheet and giving tropes belonging to it to an old character, even if it's covered in spoilers. And given inconsistent application of rules, it's also a random roulette to know what works this rules apply too. This wiki was initially made of a copy of TV Tropes pre-July of 2012, so older material here also applies.
 * Keep Circulating the Tapes: The many NSFW works and Fetish Fuel tropes that were wiped in The Google Incidents - many can only be accessed through the pages' edit history or through archive sites, and some were never archived. Some of the forks emphasized that they would be much more lenient in allowing for discussion of such works in order to appeal to disaffected users on that particular side of the Broken Base, such as the now-deleted Fetish Fuel Wiki. This was not helped by the accusations TV Tropes administration of the time made that claimed the staff and users of those forks focused on salacious material to the exclusion of all else - while it's not hard to imagine that this segment of the userbase existed, especially considering what led to the Second Google Incident to begin with, it was far more than unfair to tar every fork with that same brush.
 * Lampshade Hanging: For pages about tropes, there will be a folder section for TV Tropes lampshading how it uses the trope in some fashion. Even more meta is the logo, an actual lampshade.
 * Lighter and Softer: Sugar Wiki.
 * 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: Although they formally deny it, if one reads the threads in which wiki pages are reported and judged for possibly violating TVT's content restrictions, one will see that work pages are not judged by their content but by the work they describe.  One will almost never see discussion like "will this page as written cause us trouble with Google Ads?  Can we change it so that it doesn't?"  Rather, commentary is almost universally along the lines of "the work this page describes is offensive to me, we should not even acknowledge it exists" and decisions are made on that basis alone.  Regardless of what they claim to the contrary, except in the cases of certain famous works whose removal would bring (and have brought) negative press attention, TVT imposes a moral standard for the works that are allowed to appear on the wiki.  And that standard is determined by the Lowest Common Denominator of Squick and/or prudery found among the vocal minority who report (and demand removal of) pages.
 * The Moral Substitute: In the wake of the Second Google incident and the administrative efforts to purge itself of revenue-threatening content, other forks of TV Tropes arose as ostensible examples of this to the site, seeking to establish fairer rules and better treatment of users and preserve cut content from the site. TV Tropes administration also tried to portray the site as this in comparison to some or all the forks - see Big Lie.
 * 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.
 * Plenty of tropers think they own the pages they edit and patrol them, changing/deleting anything they don't fully agree with. For example, rva98014 thinks they own every animated film page, earning the ire of several tropers. He has since been perma-banned for edit warring, one of a very small percentage of banned users that actually deserved it.
 * Poe's Law: TV Tropes fell victim to this during The Second Google Incident - several works were cutlisted by members in protest of the "zero-tolerance" policy that was adopted. While obvious ultra-famous works like Romeo and Juliet were at little risk, one particular work named Black Bird ended up being cut for real; it was restored afterwards, and the TV Tropes administration of the time admitted it was removed in error (which was considered quite rare for them).
 * Postmodernism: Since the site is a catalog of devices used in fiction, it naturally runs on this, as do many of its forks.
 * 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 were inherited by ATT and are still being cleaned up as they are discovered). The TV Tropes 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 aimed to be this from the start. While moderation had a long way to go around the time of the site changed hands, they have since aimed towards becoming examples of this trope as well; though considerable progress has been made from the bad old post-Second Google Incident days, they are far from immune to severe missteps.
 * Running Gag: Several, most commonly "Tropes Will Ruin Your Life". There were also many Overused Running Gags:
 * 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. Other tropes that were the subject of troper misuse due to Opinion Myopia (such as Complete Monster and Magnificent Bastard, which were also subject to similar contention here) were either disambiguated or given an Example Sectionectomy to prevent their overuse.
 * Some particular Fetish Fuel-related tropes such as Panty Shot, alongside relatively tamer examples such as Hot Mom and Hot Dad, fell afoul of similar misuse, especially among the genuinely creepier elements of the old userbase. Both this unsavory behavior and the excessive administrative action taken in curtailing it is source of at least one major break in the userbase, - among many other things, it resulted in the creation of a Fetish Fuel Wiki that ended up deleted when FANDOM went on a purge of its own. It's worth noting that both TV Tropes and All The Tropes have a "No Lewdness, No Prudishness" rule intended to deter excessive one-handed editing.
 * 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?
 * 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, many of which were inherited by All The Tropes at the time of forking.
 * Sex Is Evil: In the immediate aftermath of The Second Google Incident, the administrative over-correction for the excess of commentary that was outwardly sexual (and frankly crass in some cases) was largely viewed as this by some of the Broken Base, and still is to this day - for what it's worth, this attitude has been significantly relaxed since, although retaining Google Ads still means there's some level of constraint. See also the Big Lie example above regarding the older administration's attitudes towards forks that aimed to preserve the NSFW content (whether for better or worse is another matter).
 * Theme Naming: Their trope-naming "organizations", SPOON, FORKS, KNIVES, and PLATTER, are all named after kitchen utensils.
 * There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The overly harsh punishments handed out to users that accidentally break a rule or even worse, do something that isn't bad but is perceived as bad anyway.
 * Think of the Advertisers!: One of the primary motivations for the content purge in the wake of the Second Google Incident. While partially justified by the sheer amount of Squick that the site was developing a reputation for in regards to Porn Tropes, Fetish Fuel and Fan Wank in general, the admins' solutions were seen as tilting hard towards the other extreme and generally did not sit well with the userbase at large.
 * Thrown Down a Well:
 * The Permanent Red Link Club, used for tropes and features that are deleted and locked to make sure that they could never return.
 * This treatment was also given to the infamous Troper Tales feature.
 * Tropes Will Ruin Your Life: You thought we were kidding?
 * Unperson: The TV Tropes administration of the post-Second Google Incident era have a reputation for doing this to tropers who either quit using the site or criticized their management during that time.
 * Visual Pun: Some of the images for their trope articles are this.
 * Wiki Walk: It's a wiki, what else would you expect?


 * Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick
 * 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
 * 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.
 * 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