You Know You Read Too Much All the Tropes When

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  1. You find almost all your new fiction from this site.
  2. You are so trope savvy, that the mere thought of a trope Drinking Game gives you a hangover from the last times you tried it.
  3. You think the following are appropriate names for children:
  4. You think the Idiot Ball is a real thing. And you think the Goa'uld have Idiot Ba'als.
  5. If anyone criticizes something, you tell them, "Stop Complaining About Shows You Don't Like."
  6. You snicker whenever someone orders a "Harvey Wallbanger".
  7. You NEVER have to ask "Do We Have This One??".
  8. You forget Jesus is the son of God (if you're Christian) or second-to-last Prophet of God (if you're Muslim), and think he's the god of Purgatory. And you think he habitually manifests as a crystalline dragon.
  9. You waited patiently for a revival of Arrested Development, just so you can trope it.
    • You rejoiced when the series came back in 2013 on Netflix.
  10. You think first names have "The" as a prefix.
  11. You really wonder if you have seen a trope a million times.
  12. You want to shield your children, not from sex or from drugs, but from Nightmare Fuel.
  13. You can identify the approximate age of any trope.
  14. If you're a writer:
    • You apply the Mary Sue Litmus Test to every character, just to make sure you never have one.
    • You think about what tropes you are using in your works and fantasize about the day when your work will have examples on this site.
      • You're already working on pages for your works.
    • You deliberately fall back on tropes in your work just so it will be mentioned on All The Tropes one day.
    • You dream of the day your quotes will be found on All The Tropes.
    • You don't write because you're too scared of the Cliché Storm.
    • You write with the Cliché Storm in mind, just for the hell of it.
    • When you need writing ideas, you click the Random Item button above.
  15. You will use the word "wank" in highly unusual contexts. Trope not applicable in Commonwealth countries.
  16. You use tropes to describe yourself and your friends, rather than actual traits.
  17. You will go into McDonald's and order a MacGuffin.
    • And you can do it so seamlessly that the employee doesn't notice.
    • Or the employee, with a knowing look, recognizes you as a fellow troper.
    • You've had to deliver something, and upon arrival, you say to the friend/customer service person/recipient "I brought you the MacGuffin".
  18. You will inappropriately find strokes to be humorous, but as you did a Funny Aneurysm Moment, you feel appropriately guilty afterwards.
  19. You add hyperlinks to your internal dialogue.
    • In addition, your external dialogue contains weird inflections as you pronounce the blue shifted text.
    • In addition to that addition, you have mastered applying the All Blue Entry to your external dialogue.
  20. You start applying your own Fanon Discontinuity to real life.
  21. You become pleasantly surprised when your Genre Savvy is Wrong Genre Savvy because a given movie/series has pulled off a good Trick Twist.
  22. You wish you were crazy enough to come up with an example for a given Wild Mass Guessing page, or tropes like Alternative Character Interpretation. You are crazy enough to come up with an example for a given Wild Mass Guessing page, or tropes like Alternate Character Interpretation.
  23. When the question of naming your trope "Playing Xanatos Ball With The Dog", "Normal Name", or "Super Cool But Hard To Write Name" takes up hours of thought and discussion.
  24. When you don't have to look up how to spell Phlebotinum.
  25. All the Tropes Will Ruin Your Vocabulary in the following ways:
    • You use Wiki Words constantly even when talking to non-tropers, and you don't even notice until they ask you what you're on about.
    • School today:
    Me: So the Big Bad crossed the Moral event horizon twice, but it's okay because he's such a Magnificent bastard that he pulls it off wonderfully. The type 4 anti-villain is better than the hero though, because she's such a Purity Sue.
    Friend: ...What?...
    Me: ...Sorry, I was speaking Tropese again... [walks away]
  26. Not only do you hang lampshades in everyday conversation, you also hang lampshades on the fact that you are hanging lampshades.
  27. You are able to guess what potholes will link to before rolling over them.
    • Someone tells you they "hit a pothole" and you immediately think of linked text.
    • Whenever you see blue text on a non-wiki website, you immediately, often unconsciously, click it or roll over it.
    • Bonus points if you die a little inside when you find out it's not a pothole.
  28. You predict your life based on the tropes it has been following. These predictions come true.
  29. You keep screwing up rough drafts of reports because they are formatted for this site, not for Microsoft Word.
  30. You use this site rather than Wikipedia as a source for your research papers.
    • When you have to summarize a movie or book for class, you include a list of relevant tropes.
    • In fact, your English teacher now knows several tropes by name (despite never having seen the site!) because you keep bringing them up in class.
    • In addendum, several of your non-troper friends know several tropes by name, because you keep bringing them up.
    • You keep using trope names in your history assignments, as well.
    • As well as using the site to revise for a history/literature exam.
    • Summary of the French Revolution: The Knight Templars killed all the Blue Bloods. Then they went Axe Crazy and started killing everyone else too.
    • You have cited this site as a source for your junior paper. In all fairness, the paper is an analysis of the fantasy genre, so tropes are being discussed.
  31. You have ever, at all, referred to the Moral of the Story as an 'Aesop'.
  32. You refer to Wikipedia as The Other Wiki, and scoff at Uncyclopedia or Encyclopedia Dramatica.
  33. When someone asks you why you're playing a video game, you respond, "It's Just for Fun." Otherwise, you're probably the Stop Having Fun Guy.
  34. When you decide to make a trope list for your favorite sports team.
  35. One of your iPod playlists is titled Nightmare Fuel.
  36. You try to find examples of trope names being used before they were added to the Wiki.
  37. You have contributed to every one of the Tropes of Legend.
    • You know the meaning of all the Tropes of Legend from memory.
    • You know the meaning of all the tropes from memory.
  38. You have prayed to or sworn by Crystal Dragon Jesus.
  39. Whenever you explain a new concept to someone, you try to demonstrate it using examples from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Avatar: The Last Airbender and Harry Potter. Like how Andrew in Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 8, episode 16 "Storyteller" had to use RPG style character description for everybody.
  40. You've written a book report on Sailor Nothing.
  41. You've written a complete character analysis contrasting and exploring the actions of the eponymous characters of Haruhi Suzumiya and Madame Bovary.
  42. In other online communities not running wiki software, you find yourself using single-quotation marks in varying quantities instead of HTML or BB Code tags when you want to italicize or bold something.
  43. Most Science Fiction makes you want to cry "Space Does Not Work That Way! Good night!"
  44. If someone complains about the frumpy way Queen Elizabeth II dresses, you just note that she's averting the Ermine Cape Effect.
  45. You don't make plans for Christmas. You make Xanatos Gambits. For family gatherings, you find these quickly become Gambit Roulettes. Or, for some, a Gambit Pileup.
  46. You start thinking of common real life occurrences as tropes, and sort of mentally propose and categorise them: "You Know That Thing Where you think you've turned on the oven, but actually you've just turned on the light...?"
  47. You say "It's Truth in Television" instead of "It happens in Real Life."
  48. You tell people that a certain dramatic or comedic device is Older Than Radio. You confound them further when you tell them that another one is Older Than Dirt.
  49. Nothing Squicks you anymore.
  50. You watch movies with other tropers for pure MSTing purposes. Or you do it alone.
  51. You expect other people to know what a Big Bad is.
  52. You expect other people to know that when you say The Dragon you don't actually mean a dragon. Except when you do.
  53. You expect other people to be able to recognize a Five-Man Band.
  54. You run into more difficulty than usual when talking about tropes to real people because you realize you can't call tropes by their names but you don't know what else to call them.
  55. You subconsciously refer to non-tropers as "real people" because you now think of yourself as a character.
  56. You have ever used a metaphorical dog in Real Life.
  57. You have ever referred to an especially awesome smart guy as a Magnificent Bastard, The Chessmaster, or Xanatos. That last one also counts for phrases of the form "Xanatos X"
  58. You have ever used Chekhov without referring to the writer Anton Chekhov, in a phrase other than Chekhov's Gun.
  59. You don't know who Anton Chekhov is but you do know what Chekhov's Armoury is.
  60. You are very careful not to confuse Chekhov's Gun and Chekov.
  61. You are overwhelmingly disappointed that Chekov's gun was never used as a Chekhov's Gun.
  62. You have ever used the MST3K Mantra or Bellisario's Maxim in Real Life. Bonus points if you just used the title and not the actual mantra/maxim.
  63. You keep misspelling actual words as Wiki Words, like "Fan Dumb" instead of "Fandom".
  64. You start conversations with non-tropers with words to the effect of "I read something interesting on All The Tropes the other day..."
  65. You have a mental list of tropes that have occurred to you for the current day, week, month, year, and lifetime since originally coming to All The Tropes (and memorable events before then) sorted alphabetically, by importance, by occurrences, by relation to the person you believe the trope applied to, and all sub-combinations of those lists applicable.
    • When that list isn't just a mental one.
    • It's on your resumé.
  66. When you say "Take That!". And think of All The Tropes.
  67. You say "You are not alone" instead of "Me too". You're aware of how often the above actually happens on this Wiki but aren't quite sure why.
  68. You refer to anything that scares you as Nightmare Fuel.
  69. You shrink any picture files you have that are wider than 300 pixels.
  70. People can't make small talk to you because you keep saying it's Natter.
  71. When people start speaking about any series, despite you having never seen it, you can give an accurate estimation of what happens in it.
  72. If someone is overreacting about X, you sarcastically note that "X is Serious Business."
  73. You think retcon is two words.
  74. 'Dissonance' has become a regular part of your vocabulary.
  75. The best thing that's happened to you all week is getting your first All the Tropes Made of Win point.
  76. You will yell out trope names as you watch them on your favorite show...and have people stare at you oddly for it.
    • Except for your best friends or household members, who find this perfectly normal behavior for you.
    • Whenever you say a word that your friends don't recognize, they respond "Which trope is that now?"
    • You have friends (or household members) who have learned several tropes from you without actually having visited the wiki.
  77. Your first thought after watching the first episode of a new series of something with your family or friends isn't to discuss it with them - you rush off, fire up the computer and add the new examples you've spotted.
    • You have All The Tropes open whenever you're watching something, specifically so you can add the examples as they appear.
    • Furthermore, you find that what was meant to be an expedition of no more than two minutes of editing turns into a half hour of distraction because you accidentally read one of the other examples and found a link to another trope that caught your attention. Meanwhile, your DVD player remains on pause, forgotten. Speaking of which, I've some Star Trek to return to... after the three other tabs of tropes I have open are read, that is.
  78. You think that having a complimentary reference on All The Tropes is more flattering than being on the New York Times Bestseller list, while your love of a work increases tenfold if it mentions All The Tropes.
  79. You remember September 16, 2015 as the date The Great Hack happened.
  80. You begin attempting to log into other pages using the password used to edit trope pages.
  81. You can identify tropers by what they Entry Pimp. Bonus points if you see that they've updated a specific article, and, knowing what they Entry Pimp, you can guess precisely what the example they added entailed.
  82. When a new YMMV makes it through YKTTW (especially if it's a particularly negative one), you start taking bets on how soon it'll be on the Cut List. Or, possibly, you're the one jumping to put it on the Cut List.
  83. You name a recipe after a trope. Tomato Surprise: contains a can of soup, a can of kidney beans, and a cup and a half of macaroni; Anachronism Stew contains mammoth meat, barley, and genetically modified potatoes.
  84. You have ever contemplated the possibility of actually adding tropes to the dictionary.
  85. You've come across someone saying or doing something awesome and immediately thought you want to award it a TV Tropes Made of Win Archive.
  86. You become aware that All The Tropes has ruined your vocabulary, and among other counter-measures, make a conscious effort to not even think the words "Xanatos-Anything"... then start to worry if this is all falling into someone's plan to bring you off your guard.
  87. When someone makes a scathing retort against a work of fiction, you mentally Pothole it as a Take That.
  88. You see the words imminently about to attack in a piece of fanfic and actually go to pothole it to the Department of Redundancy Department before remembering that you can't.
  89. You think Shipping tropers would be fun.
    • You think dating a troper would be fun.
    • You do date a fellow troper, and discuss tropes with them more often than your personal life.
    • Your discussions of your personal life are packed with Lampshading of relationship tropes.
  90. You refer to someone's overriding interest/specialty as their "Hat". Bonus points if you do it by referencing Star Trek.
  91. Your roommate can tell you're on All The Tropes from across the room, and you try to hide it as if it were porn.
  92. You've considered writing a book or screenplay just so your pet YKTTW has one more example.
  93. You receive an open-ended research writing assignment and immediately wonder, "Can I use my Troping knowledge to come up with a topic for this?" You then manage to answer said question in the affirmative.
  94. You are the creator and sole contributor to an entire new namespace.
  95. You like All The Tropes so much that you write it love letters.
  96. You name your computer "Trope", because you're always deconstructing and reconstructing it. Or you call it Scrappy.
  97. You identify likely tropers that you know and deliberately use trope names around them to see if you get that little smiling glimmer of recognition.
  98. You surf so long that you completely miss your working shift for the day. Worse if you are actually present!
  99. You've tried to use this site as a source in a research paper.
  100. You've succeeded in using this site as a source in a research paper.
  101. You've lost sleep trying to think of new examples for tropes.
  102. And when you finally get to sleep you dream new examples for tropes. (And about putting them on this site)
  103. You're having a conversation with someone about someone else and you think he's talking about a TV show.
  104. You have a long list of things you must read or see when you have time, all of which you would not know about had they not come up as examples of some trope or other.
  105. The list never gets shorter because you're always here.
  106. You can't see a Goff petrol tanker without thinking of My Immortal.
  107. Whenever someone brings up Those Wacky Nazis, you yell out "Godwin's Law!" Especially embarrassing in a history class. Terminally embarrassing at the Holocaust Museum.
  108. You pothole Godwin's Law examples on the All The Tropes Page for Godwin's Law. (Note: joke's over, don't actually do this.)
  109. You've not only said this history class when discussing Hilter, but by now everyone in the class, including the teacher knows what a Godwin's Law is. Bonus points if other students start using it.
  110. The only definition of "subvert" that you're aware of is that employed in the phrase "subverted expectations".
  111. You suffer Hype Aversion towards series nobody outside of this wiki's heard of, just because they're so Trope Overdosed.
  112. You have either bookmarked your favorite pages, copied them to your computer so you can look at them when the Internet's down, or printed them out. Or a combination of these.
  113. You liked this page so much that when you got to the end, you refreshed it to see if anyone else added anything while you were reading.
  114. You tell your English professor about All The Tropes... repeatedly.
  115. You get more than ten people addicted to All The Tropes.
  116. You regularly attempt to work out which of your friends is secretly a Time Lord.
    • You are fully convinced that you've found one who is.
    • You've convinced yourself that you are the Time Lord.
  117. You regularly post All The Tropes URLs on sites like Reddit simply to watch people scream and protest about how they were planning to do something productive for the next four hours.
    • You post All The Tropes links on 4chan and don't mind users telling you to fuck off.
  118. When someone talks about "the pot holes getting really bad", it takes you several minutes to realize they mean the local roads.
  119. Non-tropers are gradually losing the ability to comprehend what in the nine hells you're talking about.
  120. Non-tropers have converted themselves to tropers just to understand what the heck you're saying.
  121. You've blown $150 on a hat... but it's a very Nice Hat hat.
  122. You read trivia books in the hope of having something to put in .
  123. You've printed out trope pages and handed them to your friends whenever they need an explanation when you mention a trope.
  124. You regularly use the trope names from this site to explain plot points and don't miss a beat when people look at you like you grew a third head. You simply explain the trope.
  125. To you being tortured for a few hours is preferably to seeing a Dead Horse Trope for one.
  126. Your mind starts incorporating Trope names as regular thoughts and you barely notice it.
  127. A minor grammar mistake is enough to drive you bat-shit insane, until you try to edit it and realize you can't edit a book, which drives you even more bat-shit insane.
  128. Reading Built With Lego started a chain of events leading to you suddenly being richer by a half-dozen Lego kits, with more to follow as soon as your paycheck comes. Unfortunately, this means you have to eat the packaging.
  129. You have two dogs, named Tropey the Wonder Dog and Spoiler Hound. Or a platypus named Mindfuck.
  130. You're keeping a stockpile of funny paragraphs from this wiki in a number of Word documents. These currently total 817 pages, and you get frustrated whenever someone changes one you've copied. Or you just copy the new one, adding more to your collection.
  131. You occasionally log on to All The Tropes and get off to find you've been declared legally dead.
  132. You have in past constructed entire WMG entries due to a dream you had. When this dream revolved around Pokémon, a show you stopped watching when you were 11 and of one of the characters being mentioned as Bifauxnen in said show's Trope page, along with various nicknames for that character.
  133. If you're working on some media, you come up with new episodes/games/books/whatever by coming to this site and playing the Wiki game. On a related note, one of the characters is Xanatos Quinn, and the character with the Overly Long Name includes Kyon and O'Neill in his name. And all aliens know about Haruhi Suzumiya.
  134. You hear your sister is going to be Put on a Bus after her flight was cancelled, and you briefly wonder who will play her replacement.
  135. You have competitions with your friends to find out who has memorized the most from the Evil Overlord List.
  136. You point out whenever a product you buy is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  137. You memorized a number on this list as a point you want to edit when you've finished reading the page. You are then annoyed to discover that the coding does not include numbers, and/or you've forgotten by this point what you wanted to add.
  138. When you put stuff intended for this list in All The Tropes Ruined Your Life, instead of acknowledging your mistake, you blamed the Idiot Ball.
  139. You spend so long editing pages that the All The Tropes logo is burned into the top of your monitor.
  140. You can distinguish between a Crapsack World and a World Half Empty in the dark at fifty paces.
  141. When filling in what languages you speak, you always include Canis Latinicus and Angrish.
  142. You kept an Internet-connected laptop activated while watching The Colbert Report just so you could edit in trope examples as they happened. You then got frustrated when another happened before you've finished writing in the first one.
    • You cried when the show aired its final episode.
  143. Your Porn Stash is 50% continuity notes and 50% landscapes.
  144. You've been here for three days.
  145. You're getting bored with being Genre Savvy, and have decided to try being Wrong Genre Savvy for a few weeks. But you're never to be called out for Genre Blindness. In fact that's an insult to you!
  146. You missed at least one exam because of Wild Mass Guessing.
    • You failed at least one exam because of Wild Mass Guessing.
      • You have actually passed one exam because of Wild Mass Guessing, and your English teacher is still bewildered that you managed to make such a plausible case for Mercutio being a Time Lord.
        • Although that teacher was confused by the brief mention of his affinity for Linux.
          • You have managed to write a college application essay by applying points from Wild Mass Guessing and other tropes it links to, and were accepted.
  147. You consider Poe's Law, Chandler's Law, The Bechdel Test, and the rest of the Laws and Formulas on par with the laws of thermodynamics.
  148. You think that it is actually possible to obtain a Ph.D in Horribleness.
  149. You laugh at real-life uses of the word "Egregious".
  150. You have ever said "stop it now you horny simpletons" as a substitute for "get a room".
  151. You are wary about taking any job that requires you to wear a Red Shirt.
  152. You feel a twinge of bittersweet nostalgia or eye-rolling annoyance whenever someone assures you they "aren't making this up!"
  153. You think a Wiki Walk is an exercise routine.
  154. You forget you can't edit pages on non-wiki sites, even if you just want to fix some typos.
    • Likewise, you forget you can't edit reasons for editing, even if you just want to fix typos.
  155. So Yeah has become a normal part of your everyday speech pattern for some reason.
  156. You watch an entire series just so you can read it's WMG/Headscratchers page without worrying about spoilers.
    • You spend the whole time watching the show thinking about reading the WMG/Headscratchers page, miss something, and end up reading a spoiler you didn't know anyway.
  157. Your vision has gotten substantially worse from the eye strain that comes with spending hours a day on All The Tropes.
  158. You see some linked words on a non-All The Tropes site and expect the link to go to a All The Tropes page.
    • You're happy if it actually does.
  159. While reading this page you have a Word document open to note down anything new that comes to mind while reading.
  160. You are sitting here reading this with a plate of long ago eaten food on your lap.
    • Or you skip meals because you're troping. Just one more tab to read...
      • You've lost weight because of this site.
  161. When your baby sister asks for help in arranging her alphabet magnets, you arrange them to spell your favourite Tropes and tell her the job is done.
  162. When you are talking to your friend through the phone or chat and he/she mentions a story you've never heard of, you excuse yourself for lunch while really looking for it on All The Tropes. Ten minutes later you return having learnt everything about it.
  163. You begin sulking when you find an example you wanted to add to a page has already been added.
    • You become irrationally annoyed when a work is missing a really obvious trope that should have been added years ago.
    • You become irrationally disappointed when a new chapter/episode has already been out for a day and there are still popular tropes relevant to it that haven't been listed on the work's page yet.
  164. You call your laptop 'The Great Big Book of Everything'.
  165. You intend to re-watch old movies or movies you never liked just to see your favorite Tropes in action.
    • You watch them so you can expand or create their work pages on ATT.
  166. When playing 20 questions with your friends, when they ask you a question you say it is 'averted' or 'subverted' to what you are thinking about.
  167. You consider opening a business and naming it after a trope (example: opening a bicycle messenger service named "MacGuffin Delivery Service.")
  168. When people ask how you manage to keep fit, you tell them you take WikiWalks daily.
  169. You have ever referred to yourself as This Troper in a class.
  170. You have not reset your computer in 5 days because there are still 50 tabs of trope pages that you need to read.
    • You try to put off reading said 50 trope pages because you know when you do the number will only grow larger.
    • You use your browser's Save and Quit feature so that you can reboot every so often - and then realize the horrors that await when you reopen your browser. (Firefox, at least, has an option to always open your tabs from the last session.)
      • Your web browser uses more than 500 MB of RAM at any given time, except when not running.
      • Your computer is less than two years old but it (meaning your OS or browser) starts to SLOW DOWN when you open new trope pages.
        • Your computer is completely new, yet the OS/browser STILL manages to be tremendously slowed down every time you're on this site.
          • I've done that without a single ATT page open
      • You have so many tabs open that not only does your computer need to use the virtual memory file, the hard disk runs out of space because of said virtual file.
        • You must be either running chrome or a 64-bit OS and browser (or just not have much space...)
        • I've had a (32-bit) Firefox crash because it ran out of address space (ie even if there was free memory/swap firefox can't actually use any more... 32-bit means up to 2-3GB depending on OS and how memory is allocated by the browser)
    • Your computer crashes because you have too many trope pages open. FUCKING COMPUTER!!
  171. You spend four weeks just trying to think of something to write on this page.
  172. When you see red links on other websites you freak out when they actually have content.
  173. You create trope pages for the LiveJournal RPGs you're in, though they'd never get on All The Tropes.
  174. You talk like an excitable American teenager, using words like "awesome" and "epic" in every other sentence without noticing.
    • You think like an excitable American teenager.
    • You are an excitable American teenager.
  175. When asked for a password, your first instinct is to write 'swordfish'.
  176. When you spend your nights trying to think of new tropes.
  177. When you succeed in thinking of a new trope, then try to write a book around it.
  178. When, if you are a game programmer, you challenge your fellow programmers to see who can Lampshade Hanging, Subverted Trope, and Exaggerated Trope the most tropes.
  179. When you do the above, even if your fellow programmers aren't tropers.
    • And you're not a programmer.
    • Heck. You do this all yourself.
  180. When you dream about tropes.
    • When you have nightmares about your examples being removed.
  181. When your schedule looks something like this: wake up, check All The Tropes, eat breakfast, check All The Tropes, eat lunch, check All The Tropes, eat dinner, check All The Tropes, sleep.
    • When you forget to eat lunch because you are too busy checking All The Tropes.
      • When you forget to sleep, for the above reason.
  182. When your mom/dad/spouse realizes you spend to much time on All The Tropes and sneaks over to your computer and changes the password. At 3:00 in the morning, because you are only out of All The Tropes when you are sleeping.
    • When your mom/dad/spouse attempts to do the above, but they can't, because you are still on All The Tropes at 3:00 in the morning.
  183. When somebody has to put a time limit on how long you're allowed to stay on All The Tropes to ensure that you come out alive.
  184. You add a reference or entry to a page, linking to other tropes, then immediately open those mentioned tropes.
  185. You're disappointed that you haven't "scored" as highly on fulfilling all the points of this list.
  186. * Trope* * Trope* * Trope* * Trope* * Trope* * Trope* ? * Trooooooooooooooooooooope* !!! * Trope* * ...trope* (This is what your world sounds like).
  187. Whenever your family replaces a Lampshade Hanging, you snicker a little.
  188. In trying to think of the title of a work, you instead think of a trope name.
  189. You've come up with a Double Entendre for most of the tropes and enjoy using them in real life, among fellow tropers and non-tropers alike. Also, BFS no longer means what it should when you say it.
  190. You can name every single faction in Warhammer 40,000, including all four Chaos Gods and at least three different chapters of Space Marines, despite never having seen the game played in your entire life.
  191. When writing in a notebook or in Word, you constantly write WordsTogether or with {{brackets}} around them, and it takes you a few seconds to realise why it won't link you (or your Professor) to the relevant trope.
  192. If you're in a Girls Love relationship, you start to look for signs that it's just a Romantic Two-Girl Friendship.
  193. When watching a movie (or reading a book, or engaging in some other form of media), you automatically write down all the tropes as they appear.
  194. Corollary to 119: You explain series on other sites by linking to their All The Tropes page.
    • You immediately scrolled up to 119 to check what it was.
      • You were shocked at how far away it turned out to be.
        • You tried to use the Find command to get back up there and got mad at the computer for only directing you to this one.
      • You didn't need to use the Find command again to get back down here because you remembered what number you were on.
  195. If you make games/books/whatever, you either propose a new name for known tropes or define entirely new ones in it.
  196. Whenever All The Tropes has scheduled downtime, you cry.
  197. When some people in Real Life have told you that your attempts at becoming a Deadpan Snarker are not really a good thing, because, you know, there are many important people in Real Life that won't enjoy getting only sarcastic answers.
  198. You see council workers cutting branches off a tall tree and mentally link it to Chainsaw Good and Blade on a Stick.
  199. All The Tropes and all the stuff related to it really is Serious Business to you, but neither do you, neither do the other tropers seem to notice that.
    • That makes the writer of the previous line to fail in the given example.
  200. More than 20% of your open browser tabs are All The Tropes... and the total tab count is a three-digit number.
  201. Whenever someone takes offense because you laughed at their misfortune or something else that really wasn't funny, you defend yourself by saying, "But it's Narm!"
  202. When another site is down, you automatically think "The server hates me right now..."
  203. You’ve written down an example on the back of an old receipt you found in your car… while in traffic.
  204. You had a dream about editing All The Tropes, and the first thing you thought when you woke up was to add that example.
  205. You no longer wonder how you managed to get from Tropes Will Ruin Your Life to Autobots Rock Out.
  206. You write trope names as Wiki Words with no blank spaces outside of All The Tropes and expect the link to work.
    • At The Other Wiki.
    • On paper in Real Life.
    • In curly brackets if need be.
    • When you talk.
    • You've done so deliberately, just to set up a joke.
  207. You've never seen a show, but you know it so well that you can complain about it with none of the guilt.
  208. You've ever linked to so many tropes in a posting on a Message Board that you posted something similar to an All Blue Entry. And that was a posting with multiple paragraphs.
  209. You right-click to "Open Link in New Tab" and read "Open a New Trope".
  210. You want or have your very own Thing that goes Doink
  211. You've got three computers with six operating systems and even more browsers, and you're Cookied Up in all these browsers.
    • Heck, you're Cookied Up on your mobile phone.
    • You routinely clean all your cookies with the sole exception of the All The Tropes cookies.
  212. You've actually read My Immortal.
  213. The first suggestion that comes up when you type "you" in your URL bar is this page.
  214. You get arrested for Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking
  215. You notice Ho Yay subtext in the least likely of places, making your friends ask what you're giggling about when you watch certain movies.
    • Same goes for when you notice certain Les Yay subtext and start chuckling.
      • OBJECTION!
  216. You have bread, eggs, milk and squick on your shopping list.
  217. When you feel down, the first thing you do to cheer yourself up is head over to the Crowning Moment of Heartwarming page. You'll still wind up crying, but in a good way. The Real Life ones in particular are reserved for more severe depression.
  218. When talking with friends after you say something the most common repose is "You used another of those trope things could you explain it?" (Thanks FORKS)
  219. You know the true meanings of the words "subvert" "invert" and "avert" and can use them flawlessly in real conversation.
    • You get irrationally annoyed when someone else uses one of those words incorrectly in real life. Bonus point if you find yourself wanting to edit the conversation to fix their mistake.
  220. You have All The Tropes as your home page.
  221. You die a little inside when no one replies to your Headscratchers.
  222. You write Fan Fiction solely to have a Mary Sue list all of the tropes found in the series.
    • And regularly ask other Fan Fiction writers if they're Tropers when you review.
  223. You can identify a Love Triangle by type at a glance without consulting Triang Relations.
  224. The word "cliche" is your Berserk Button.
  225. You refresh the forum pages every five seconds, hoping some one has replied to your post.
    • Someone has, and you now consider it a great day.
  226. When someone orders a ham and cheese toastie, you snigger a little.
  227. You take a class related to media and more than 50% of your notes are filled with Tropes.
    • You take ANY class and more than 50% of your notes are filled with tropes.
    • You take a media class and use All The Tropes as your only source (actually, that's probably a good idea).
  228. You have read about tropes occurrences and recognized them afterwards when you watched the show despite the odds of that happening as often as it has happened to you
  229. You read a page in the edit window so you can add new things as you think of them.
  230. Whenever anyone uses the term "color coded" it is always for your convenience.
  231. On Halloween, you went as a Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot.
  232. You actually think that there would be less trolling if people would just indicate Sincerity Mode or Sarcasm Mode.
  233. You trope yourself.
  234. You add new trope examples to a work of media just to subvert, invert, avert, play with, or justify them.
  235. You can't bring yourself to blindly hate things no matter what the premise.
  236. You read Anti-Poopsocking and try to create a new trope about urinating in your shoes.
  237. You try fitting your schedule around All The Tropes
  238. You never write for more than twenty minutes without saving.
    • You never do anything for twenty minutes without saving.
  239. You feel a void in your soul whenever you're seperated from All The Tropes for more than a few hours.
  240. You regularly have dreams in which you edit All The Tropes.
    • You awaken from said dreams to find that the examples were added while you were asleep... by you.
  241. You consider all the tropers you know best friends... much to the dismay of the person you've known since 3rd grade and did everything with.
  242. Your parents scheduled an appointment for you with a therapist due to All The Tropes and you got the therapist addicted.
  243. You firmly believe any statement, question, or request can be answered by linking the other person to an All The Tropes page.
  244. In the movie theatre, you whip out a pen and start taking notes on the tropes used so that you'll be sure not to forget any by the time you get home.
  245. Your parents think you're studying, but you're actually here.
  246. You look for the Laconic tab in The Other Wiki when you're in a hurry or looking a for a short explanation.
    • You look at the Laconic tab on All The Tropes, but always end up reading the page itself anyway.
    • You look for the Laconic tab in your college textbooks. When you realize that there are none, you decide to fail your exam rather than allow studying to cut into your troping time.
  247. You check All The Tropes before your emails, no matter where you are or how long you've been out of contact with your family and friends.
  248. Checking the All The Tropes page of a work once you've finished it has become so much a part of your routine that it's not after you've read every page that you feel sad that it's over.
  249. You daydream about your favourite celebrities being Tropers and being fully aware of everything All The Tropes says about them or their series.
  250. You've spent hours trying to think of the most trope-heavy and yet still accurate sentence possible.
  251. You haven't done a bunch of these, but now have become firmly resolved to fulfill as many as possible as a matter of principle.
  252. You accidentally name a trope in your homework and have an uncontrollable urge to follow it with "LOL I see what I did there." Bonus points if it's astronomy homework and you capitalize the words IN SPACE!
  253. You don't have to visit pages on the site to give links to them.
    • You have posted at least one dead link because the page was renamed and you didn't check if the URL was correct before posting.
  254. Half of your browser addons was added for the sole purpose of enhancing your troping experience.
  255. The first thing you do after finishing a series is going to the works page for it and finally filling out the spoilered sentences and seeing what trope applied to what plot twist.
  256. You look at Dairy Queen's slogan ("So Good, It's RiDQulous"), and all you can think about is So Bad It's Good, So Bad It's Horrible, and So Cool Its Awesome.
  257. You have ever told your spouse/significant other that sex with them is a Crowning Moment of Awesome. Bonus points if you have said it while in bed.
  258. You have the irresistible urge to add examples to this page.
    • And if you do, you click "Show Preview" to check if you got the coding right.
  259. You actually read this entire list.
    • You read it several times.
    • You've read it backwards too.


  • You watched all of the Joss Whedon series on Netflix (where all are available streaming) just to understand where so many of these tropes came from.
    • Bonus points for watching them in chronological production (not aired) order
  • You have now probably a huge amount of bookmarks/favorites. Over 2/3 of those bookmarks are ATT articles.
  • You post a thread on a forum relating tropes to users, forum incidents, and the forum itself. And then get at least three other users addicted to All The Tropes.
  • Your friends have started sending you emails with random words in blue and underlined just to drive you insane when they're not actually links. And it works!
  • You move in to a new place, and find you need new lampshades, so first you go to this site.
  • You apply the Mohs Scale of Rock and Metal Hardness to all the songs on your iPod.
  • You hear someone say the word "gospel" in a latin based language and instantly think of Mind Rape and Tang!
  • You see an asterisk on a web page, and you try clicking it to read the subscript.
  • You find a page you haven't commented on yet and do everythIng you can to find a new example for that page.
  • Instead of hearing something and thinking that's A Good Name for a Rock Band, you think 'Good title for a trope.'
  • Whenever something tropable comes up in conversation, you mentally Pothole it.
  • You annoy everyone in the room by sitting on the couch with your laptop on your lap and reading all the trope examples for a Trope to them.

If you've actually read this far, there's no doubt about it. You're addicted. You've been booked into a rehab clinic for 4:00. Don't be late!

Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/You_Know_You_Read_Too_Much_All_the_Tropes_When?oldid=2031962"