All The Tropes:Troper Critical Mass

Wow. This series is awesome! Maybe it has a All The Tropes page!

Yeah. And—Wow! Looks like everyone—Alice, Bob, Carol, even that Lurker Zeke has added an edit or two! And this is only a few episodes into the first season!

You are witnessing a show in Troper Critical Mass. A whole mass of us turning to add to a show, Trope or other wiki page. This is the Wiki Magic writ large, when interest, dedication and focus all hit at once, and a page just grows.

This doesn't just happen to currently in progress works, either. An old book or show can ride to sudden prominence and attain the mass. A Vitalizing Edit may cause fans to realize a favourite show Needs More Love indeed. And the Fandom Rejoiced might mean every detail of a coming work that gets leaked to be gobbled up and added to the mass. What counts is the burst of interest and activity that sends a work's/ trope's examples count from a short list to a suddenly comprehensive one.

Note that trying to engineer a Troper Critical Mass is rather hard. You have to cultivate the desired interest, keep people involved, and prevent them from drifting. Given that controlling any notable group of people, let alone Tropers requires... well, Bizarre and Improbable Giraffe Herding Techniques, it's best to just ride the wave.

However, some decent Troper attraction methods include: being Troperiffic, having particularly Genre Savvy characters, or basically giving us lots and lots of material to write about. Averted Tropes and Subverted Tropes also helps. Deconstruction helps greatly. Tropers love those.

A sustained period under Troper Critical Mass can rapidly put something in the Trope Overdosed ranks. The mass can be broken/ turned to Accentuate the Negative if things go sour in a work—say, They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot or you realize The Chris Carter Effect has kicked in.

Needless to say, it's going to have a lot of wicks... not to mention a massive number of spoilers, to the point where we occasionally just stop hiding them because every Troper who visits the page has heard about them.