All The Tropes:Creator Page Guidelines
All The Tropes is primarily about tropes and the works that use them. However, oftentimes information about Authors, Actors, Directors, Producers, Mangaka, Composers, Animators, game developers, or other creators can be relevant to our understanding of the tropes in their works. To that end, we have Creators pages.
Creator pages get the "creator" page type. We have an index for creators; it can be found here.
These pages document information about creators pertaining to their works and the tropes they use. Any creator can have a page if someone is willing to make it.
Note, however, that not all pages about people will fall into this category. Some, such as The Presidents, are Useful Notes and/or Historical Domain Characters. Others are pages for Musicians or professional wrestlers that, while they may look like creator pages, are actually work pages for documenting the tropes used in their performances, respectively (with the page type "work", not "creator").
What can go on creator pages:
- An overview of works they've created. A simple bulleted list of works they've been involved with is usually a good place to start.[1]
- An index. Some creator pages use their bulleted list of works as an index for those works. This is usually reserved for higher-level creators like Video Game Companies. Examples include Valve Software and Dark Horse Comics.
- Tropes that appear frequently in their works. If a creator has a Signature Style, their creator page is a good place to talk about it. For example, Michael Bay's page lists tropes like Stuff Blowing Up, Summer Blockbuster, and Technology Porn.
- Trivia about them. We have lots of tropes and Trivia Trope that can legitimately apply to creators, like Dyeing for Your Art, Trolling Creator, Pen Name, Creator Breakdown, and Author Existence Failure. Most of these are okay to include on a creator page, or on their Trivia Trope subpage as appropriate.
- Conversational Troping. Normally, we don't trope Real Life people. But creators often give interviews, or tweet, or other such forms of Word of God, and they often talk about tropes. So if they're discussing, conversing, lampshading, or invoking tropes, those tropes are fair game for their page.
What should not go on creator pages:
- Tropes applied to the creator as if they are a fictional character. Please resist the urge to apply character tropes to Real Life people. We've had a lot of Square Peg, Round Trope issues in the past with this, so as a general guideline, it's best to apply No Real Life Examples, Please to creators. If it seems harmless, it might be overlooked Just for Fun, and there is an exception for Conversational Troping as mentioned above, but on the whole this is something best avoided.
- Tropes that apply to individual works they've created. Any tropes listed should be relevant to their work as a whole, not to just one work. So if a trope only applies to one work they've made, please list it on that work's page instead.
- Creator Bashing. Creator pages should not be used to complain about how much a person sucks. We're not here to hate on people. Multiple creator pages, including Uwe Boll and Microsoft, were sent to the Permanent Red Link Club on TV Tropes because editors just couldn't resist spewing bile; we really don't want to have to do the same thing here. Please keep it neutral.
- Subjectivity and YMMV. We don't list YMMV items for real-life people. That includes creators. Please don't list Audience Reactions or YMMV for a creator.
- Drooling. In the past, we've had pages for actresses that consisted primarily of gushing about how hot they are. This is not okay. It's inappropriate and will not be tolerated.