All The Tropes is a community-edited wiki website dedicated to discussing Creators, Works, and Tropes -- the people, projects and patterns of creative writing in all kinds of entertainment: television, literature, movies, video games, and more.
And by all kinds of entertainment, we don't just mean English language content (especially just American English content), we want to cover and address all types of media from around the world and the tropes that media uses, as both tropes and the works that use them are universal.
Tropes are tools of the trade for writers; They are devices and conventions that we the audience expect to see again and again. Whether tropes are cliche or just standard for the genre is largely a matter of writing quality and personal opinion. But tropes will always exist, as they often reflect life -- and we exist to document them, play with them, and generally have fun with them.
This wiki is called All The Tropes because we want to accept discussion of patterns in all forms of media while keeping censorship to a minimum. We want to encourage creative thought, discuss new works, and welcome everyone to play around. This is not Wikipedia, this is a site for fans.
We hope to educate and entertain -- to be both informal and informative. And we hope that you'll join us.
So read, edit, have fun, and play nice!
This wiki is an English specific wiki, and our content may reflect a strong American bias due to the fact we forked from TV Tropes, which had a strong bias in that regard. If you would like to help us make a foreign language version of ATT or help improve our international appeal, please contact the ATT administrators and we'll be happy to provide any resources you may need. .
Differences From the Competition
TV Tropes does not allow certain articles and topics to be discussed, because of censorship policies ostensibly imposed by their advertisement sponsors. We are hosted on a service funded by donations, so we have no ads (and thus no chance of being redirected to a malware-injection site by a hostile ad) and no widespread censorship. We have a wide range of other benefits too: modern software, secure browsing, and administrators who listen to other opinions. For a fuller explanation of the schism, see Why We Forked TV Tropes.
Tropedia is a FANDOM fork of All The Tropes (minus the branding as that is our trademark now they expelled the founder over a matter they deemed in violation of their Terms of Service), and are as censorship free as ourselves, with some limited exceptions for matters pertaining to certain FANDOM policies. Content from there can be imported here and vice-versa, under the terms of the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.
Users can be banned with no warning for virtually any reason, including admin crankiness and spite, usually with no appeal
User bans are strictly controlled by wiki policy which prohibits spite bans and other abuses of power
We are fierce advocates of the free content reuse policy of Wikimedia Foundation and our site license and reuse policy was modeled on their own because we want to share our content with the world, and don't believe it should be hoarded or used to make a profit, because like the WMF, we believe knowledge should be free, and since you can reuse WMF content here (with proper attribution), please check out the following WMF wikis for anything you might wish to use for pages here:
—Professor Lawrence Pierce, The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular
The act of taking a single (often minor) action or trait of a character within a work and exaggerating it more and more over time until it completely consumes the character. Most always, the trait/action becomes completely outlandish and it becomes their defining characteristic. Sitcoms and Sitcom characters are particularly susceptible to this, as are peripheral characters in shows with long runs.
Named for one of the examples in The Simpsons, Ned Flanders, who was originally just a kind and mildly religious fellow (contrast to Homer), before becoming the obsessively pious milquetoast he is best known as today.
Miraheze Meta - The main wiki of the service we are hosted on. An incredible wiki farm that is ad free and costs nothing, funded purely through donations, and who we recommend highly if you want to set up a wiki of your own that also hosts some other good wikis you might want to check out.
Poser and Daz Studio Free Resources Wiki - A wiki for users of the Poser and Daz Studio programs that provides free support and resources for users of those programs.
We have more than just Trope And Works pages, below are the other major sections of the wiki: