Title Bin

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Long ago, in the magical land of TV Tropes, back when Fun was more important than profits, prudery and moderator power trips, there once was a special place called the Title Bin. Originally a page created to store particularly clever turns of phrase for future use as trope names, it soon grew by leaps and bounds as tropers turned it into a massive game, proposing new titles and riffing off existing ones (there or in the rest of the wiki). Puns, Snowclones, In-Jokes and all manner of other wordplay became the rule of the day, and the size of the Bin exploded, growing to a point where it had to be split out into alphabetical subpages.

There were a lot of titles thrown into the bin.

Still, despite the depths of silliness, real tropes got real titles from the Bin -- you can find most of them on the page Ascended Bin Titles.

Now as most tropers here know, All The Tropes is based on a copy of TVT made in the first couple weeks of July 2012. Among the things that were copied was the Title Bin and its subpages, but for some reason they were never converted into MediaWiki format with the rest of the wiki content. Instead they got rolled together into a single large text file, which was then stashed and forgotten on the hard drive of one of the ATT admins for nine years.

Meanwhile, as far as we've been able to determine though the Wayback Machine, sometime not too long after July 2012, the TV Tropes staff apparently decided that Troping was much too serious a business to permit something as frivolous and fun as the Title Bin. So they deleted it outright. (And judging from the few references to it left there, they're proud of it, too.)

Fortunately that forgotten copy of the Title Bin was rediscovered and has been restored. All The Tropes was founded as a reaction to casual censorship on TVT, and we're happy to rescue yet another bit of the old, fun TV Tropes in open defiance of those who have gutted it over the years.

Now, we don't have any real rules for this section above the usual wiki guidelines. But it seems appropriate to repeat some of the original content this page had before TVT deleted it, slightly edited for ATT:

The usual order of things is that someone finds a trope and we all have a bit of fun coming up with an irreverent name for it.
In here, let's take a stab at the other way 'round: snappy titles in search of a trope. No fair trying to influence things with text other than the title. No fair having trope-length titles. Don't forget the "snappy".
This also gives us a place to store titles from the Trope Workshop and elsewhere that don't quite fly. We can "throw them in the Title Bin." If it ever comes out then it's an Ascended Bin Title and can be moved there.
Do credit this site[1] if you end up using one of these to name your rock band.

The only other things we'd want to add to this is if a title from the Bin does get used and it has "children", don't delete it -- put it in HTML strike-out markup (<s></s>). And if the title is a flat-out pun, add it to Just for Pun as well as Ascended Bin Titles.

So there you go. Have fun.

  1. That means All The Tropes now, as TVT would like to pretend these pages never existed.