All The Tropes

TV Tropes

Revision as of 16:55, 3 January 2023 by Umbire the Phantom (talk | contribs) (And top it off)


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.

Tropes expressed in the Wiki proper:
  • 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. Nowadays it encompasses all media, insofar as their need for ad revenue allows them to.
  • Artistic License Law: Fighteer's belief that casually adding a non-negotiable, unilateral (and implicitly retroactive) claim to all contributors' copyrights to the TVT Admninistrivia page in 2012 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 made.
  • Author Appeal:
  • Beige Prose: The Laconic pages.
  • 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 statements concerning users' ability to "disagree with the site's editorial or administrative policies" as this.
    • Oh, that's perfectly true. You're only banned from the wiki if you admit it.
      • When your editing rights are removed, the message you get once you try to edit a page claims it's not a punishment when it's anything but one as it prevents a person from contributing even if the only reason given is them having consistently having minor mistakes that makes their stuff look "not neat", pointing this lie out will bring harsher punishment like a total site ban or more childishly in one example forcing the person to redirect to google when they try to access the site.
  • 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.

OF COURSE, THOSE TROPERS ARE AWARE THAT MAKING NOTE OF THOSE MOMENTS WILL RESULT IN IMMEDIATE EXTERMINATION AND/OR SWIRLY-ING.

  • 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: As of 2021, TV Tropes detects some forms of ad-blocking and automatically displays 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 a larger internet-wide trend across various websites attempting to maintain their ad revenue.
  • Hair-Trigger Temper: Moderator Fighteer is known for this, especially towards those who have been suspended for any reasons. Fighteer himself has admitted that he's like this to keep "troublemakers" in line and to intimidate trolls - he's been known to define "troublemaker" as anyone who disgrees with him, even long-standing members of the wiki.
  • Hive Mind: A conscious goal. At one point, the Ask The Tropers page description was "Appeals to the troper hivemind".
  • Hurricane of Puns:
  • 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.
  • Lampshade Hanging: For pages about tropes, there will a folder section for TV Tropes, lampshading how TV Tropes uses the trope explained on the page in some fashion. Very meta. Even more meta is the logo. Which is the Lampshade.
  • Lighter and Softer: Sugar Wiki, where all the positive opinions go to.
  • 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.
  • The Moral Substitute: In the wake of the Second Google incident and the administrative efforts to purge itself of revenue-threatening content resulted in other forks of TV Tropes arising as examples of this to the site, seeking to establish fairer rules and better treatment of users.
  • Orwellian Editor: During Fast Eddie's tenure as admin, forum threads that criticized him or his wiki ended up nuked, meaning that anyone who tried to access it would be redirected to a blank page. Eddie wasn't the only one with nuke powers, though - the moderators themselves had the ability to nuke threads, and took full advantage of these, also resulting in the bans of those who do the disagreeing).
  • Overused Running Gag:
  • 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[1] 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 admitted it was removed in error (which was considered quite rare for them).
  • Post Modern: Plenty of examples. Since the site is a catalog of devices used in fiction, the whole site is this.
  • 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). TVT's 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 proven themselves 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.
  • Running Gag: Several, most commonly "Tropes Will Ruin Your Life".
  • 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?[context?]
  • Screw the Rules, I Make Them: Fast Eddie's sole guiding principle during his final years as owner of the site, starting with the Second Google Incident. A good case in point: when he established the P5 he expressly reserved the right to overrule them and delete something he didn't like even if they felt it was "safe" for the site, just because he didn't like it -- while holding up the P5 as having the "final authority" over wiki content.
  • 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 from the excess of commentary that was outwardly sexual (and frankly crass in some cases) is largely viewed as this by some of the Broken Base - for what it's worth, this attitude has been significantly relaxed since, although retaining Google Ads still means there's some level of constraint.
  • Theme Naming: Their trope-naming "organizations", SPOON, FORKS, KNIVES, and PLATTER, were all named after kitchen utensils.
  • There Is No Kill Like Overkill: A few years ago, TV Tropes happily handed out permabans to anyone who criticized them. Disagree with the administration of the site? Well, then enjoy getting a permanent ban and being redirected to Google every single time you try to access it.
  • 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, the solution of tilting hard towards the other extreme 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?
  • Visual Pun: Some of the images for their trope articles are this.
  • Wiki Walk: It's a wiki, what else would you expect?
  • Wimpification: The evolution of TVT from a free-wheeling New Media entity open to every possible point of view into a site so thin-skinned and unable to bear a single word of criticism, from either within or without, that it will casually deny the very existence of the critic -- and bans its own users for even mentioning them.
Tropes which apply to their Forums:
  1. ↑ ...which has a history of being used this way.
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