TV Tropes


Affectionately known as The Other Tropes Wiki, TV Tropes is a wiki documenting, in a fairly informal manner, the various conventions of fiction. They're quite similar to All The Tropes, but have a few differences.

Like any sizeable work, they've collected their own fair share of tropes.

Tropes expressed in the Wiki proper:
  • Accentuate the Negative: Darth Wiki.
  • Artifact Title: It started with TV (Buffy the Vampire Slayer in particular). 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.
  • Beige Prose: The Laconic pages.
  • 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, though.
  • 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 just 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.
  • Censorship Bureau: The P5, who were formed in the aftermath of Google revoking their ads for the second time. Their job is to keep the wiki clean from porn.
  • Darker and Edgier:
    • The Useful Notes sections, detailing more darker facets about reality than fiction.
    • Of course, there's also Darth Wiki, where all the negative opinions go to, though since the wiki has been trying to purge as much negativity as possible, even the Darth Wiki has been severely pruned over time.
  • Dark World: Darth Wiki.
  • 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.
  • Death of the Author: Strongly underlies the philosophy of troping as defined by the site.[1]
  • Drinking Game: They have one, which we inherited.
  • 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.
  • Hive Mind: A conscious goal.
  • Hurricane of Puns:
    • Just read the Just for Pun index.
    • The Sorting Algorithm of Tropes index qualifies, although the puns will likely slip under your radar if you don't have a computer science background.
  • 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.
  • Mind Screw: At least half the entries in Wild Mass Guessing.
  • Moe Anthropomorphism: Trope-tan -- and her little dog, too.
  • Moral Guardians: On the one hand, they deny it, but on the other, the placeholders for deleted work pages like Pokegirls make it very clear they were deleted out of administrator outrage or disapproval of their content, not for any other reason. Works apparently must meet a minimum moral standard in order to be worthy of the honor of a TV Tropes page.
  • The Moral Substitute: In the wake of the Second Google incident, the administration cast its efforts to purge itself of revenue-threatening content as turning TV Tropes into the Moral Substitute for itself. In the years following, it's also managed to convince at least a part of its user base that All The Tropes and other forked troping wikis are run by perverts who focus on salacious material to the exclusion of anything else.
  • Orwellian Editor: The moderation staff routinely deletes anything they don't like or which dares to disagree with their opinions. (They also delete those who do the disagreeing.) Entire threads have been known to vanish when the subject matter ventures into areas that the mods simply don't want discussed. They are aided in this by PMWiki's bare-minimum history feature, which retains little more than the last couple dozen edits (let alone a full audit trail back to the page creator), and which provides no simple mechanism for restoring deletions.
  • Overused Running Gag: I Am Not Making This Up and So Yeah were so overused that the wiki said "Enough is enough!" and purged all mention of them from the wiki, deleting and perma-locking their pages.
  • 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, we will admit, we have inherited and still have lurking about on ATT). 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.
  • 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 the 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.
  • "Stop Having Fun!" Guys: More than a few of the admins and mods, although with the late-2014 change in ownership, this may change.
    • There also appeared to be a clique of tropers who for some years actively patrolled the Made of Win pages specifically to find things to delete.
  • Sugar Bowl: What the "no negativity" directive strives to make the entire wiki.
  • Theme Naming: Their trope-naming "organizations", SPOON, FORKS, KNIVES, and PLATTER, were all named after kitchen utensils.
  • Think of the Advertisers!: The primary motivation for the content purge in the wake of the Second Google Incident.
  • Thrown Down a Well: The Permanent Red Link Club.
  • 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. ↑ And during the end of Fast Eddie's reign, the staff made it pretty clear that they were all in favor of it being a bit more literal when it came to creators who were critical of TVT.
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