Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
"You're pathetic. You'll never catch up. (...) Maybe you should try something more of your speed, like Freddie."
The writers have let the mythos they have generated get so thick and convoluted that a new reader/viewer has very little chance of understanding the significance of anything. They are locked out of understanding the story by all the reliance on continuity.
This is one of the main bones of contention between creators and executives. Executives want each episode to potentially bring in new audience. Creators want to entertain the audience they have. In a rare case of this wiki taking the side of the executive meddlers, we have to admit that continuity lock-out is never caused by the execs. It has to be written.
The standard answer to this issue is the Previously On segment: many shows on this list open each episode with a short capsule summary of events you should be aware of. Of course, Previously Ons have their own drawbacks, such as inadvertently providing spoilers or flat-out not working. The better answer is Better On DVD: after all, the best way for anyone to understand any show is to buy the DVDs and watch it from the beginning, sometimes more than once or with the help of fan annotations. In Web Comics, can be the impetus for an Archive Binge or a justification for Archive Panic.
So why bother with the intense continuity at all? Simple: Tropes Are Not Bad. An intricate series-spanning plot often results in a stronger and more interesting overall show. You may not catch as many fans, but the ones you do get are yours for life; a reprehensible idea, of course, to those whose chief only concern is creating as many Cash Cow Franchises as possible.
Examples
Anime
- Eureka Seven. Yeah, just TRY and watch it mid-season.
- This happened with the Mobile Suit Gundam's original UC timeline, which is one of the main reasons Alternate Universe series were made.
- It was also a major driving force behind the creation of Metal Armor Dragonar; Bandai wanted to bring in fans who might have otherwise been stymied by the existing Gundam mythos and were ready to switch production to Dragonar if it outperformed Gundam ZZ. It didn't, but remains a cult favorite.
- Parodied in an episode of Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei: Itoshiki was driven to despair by, among other things, the fact that his own show had so many running gags that it was impossible for new viewers to understand. Hence, he changed the screen so that it displayed constantly changing information about all the characters and their personalities, and went on to explain several of the nominal puns and running jokes.
- Fullmetal Alchemist. Especially if you're watching the OVA and didn't see the last few episodes.
- Naruto is susceptible to this during its arcs.
- Heck, any anime that's managed to run for over a year, really. Doubly so for manga, which are less restricted by airtime and, as such, can keep going much longer without cancellation or a forced ending.
- Given the length of Jojos Bizarre Adventure, it's natural that this can happen. However, the author is generally good at keeping new readers up to date, as every volume of the manga has a timeline of the series, and the various relationships outlined.
- The first, third, fourth, and seventh parts of the series can easily be picked up and read without any previous knowledge about the series. The others require *some* background knowledge, but that's it.
- Death Note, mostly due to the Thirty Xanatos Pileup nature of the series. It's possible to jump in within the first ten episodes or so, but after Light and L actually meet each other, forget that.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion subverts this, in that you don't understand anything about the overall plot coming OUT of the series.
- As punishment for anybody skipping the Bount Arc, the producers of Bleach left the three mod-souls so people could go "WTF who are these guys" and be forced to see their origins. But then again, they're just there to create even more filler...
- However, the mod-souls were actually introduced at the very beginning of the arc, before we even saw much of the Bounts.
Comic Books
- This is a common criticism leveled against long-running comic series, such as Spider-Man or X-Men. Unfortunately, attempts to fix the problem, usually through Cosmic Retcons, can often simply make it worse; by the end of the crisis, most of the history has been cleaned up, but it doesn't stick. Writers are too fond of elements of the story which got hit with Ret Con, so they slowly bring them back in. Superman was a victim of this after the original Crisis Crossover, Crisis On Infinite Earths, and comics fans are already laying bets about how long it'll take Spider-Man to reverse the retcons of "One More Day." *
Well, considering how reviled the retcon is, about half laying bets and half just praying to every God they can think of that it'll be soon. Marvel managed to pull it off with the Ultimate Universe Ultimate Marvel, but it's probably only a matter of time until it becomes as convoluted as the original. (Ultimatum may be evidence that this time has come).
- Chris Claremont took this to eleven with his out-of-continuity miniseries X-Men: The End, which attempts to bring every subplot of thirty years to a satisfactory conclusion. Anyone who claims to have understood the miniseries is either Chris Claremont or a liar, and we're not sure about the former.
- It could be argued that long-standing hardcore fans are themselves to blame, at least in part, for this problem, as any attempt to reduce the amount of continuity and make the universes more accessible to new readers elicits outrage from long-time fans who are angry that their old issues and favorite stories within them are supposedly considered no longer part of the character. Unwilling to risk some of their best customers, companies like Marvel, especially, are reluctant to do so.
- A brief summary of One More Day: Faced with the challenge of making flagship character Spider-Man more accessible without alienating long-time fans, Marvel attempted to simplify the comic's continuity without invalidating past events. This was achieved by giving an in-story reason to explain that certain plot points (e.g. Spider-Man's longstanding marriage to Mary-Jane Watson) would simply no longer be remembered by any of the characters. The comic then jumped some time into the future, allowing the writers to make several other changes "off-panel"(e.g. resurrecting a dead character and restoring Spider-Man's secret identity) without immediately having to explain them.
- Fred Perry's Gold Digger has managed to achieve a degree of Continuity Lockout nearing that of The DCU, despite having only existed since the early '90s and consisting only of one main title, a short-lived spinoff, and a few early crossovers with Ninja High School. Miss a few issues and you're likely to be met with a completely different set of cast members some of whom haven't shown up for a few years, sometimes not even mentioning the main characters.
- This is probably because it's a one-creator comic that has been running non-stop since the 90s. Unlike a shared universe, Fred is free to expand the mythology without worrying about stepping on anyone's toes or worrying about messing with other comics, so there's little other reason for him to not flesh everything out.
- He is attempting to combat this with the 101st color comic, basically set a few years after the 100th and having some new archaeologists under the tutelage of Gina. Who is also a professor.
Film
- The more recent Harry Potter films have had this problem in an unusual way. Each individual movie has been more or less comprehensible without reading the books. However, when put into a movie continuity, things don't make sense.
- As an example, the plot and tension of Order of the Phoenix hinges on the fact that the only person who would admit to Voldemort's return is Harry Potter. The problem is that if you saw Goblet of Fire you know that isn't true. Because the Ministry of Magic clearly has someone in custody who could tell them (or they could magic it out of his head): Barty Crouch Jr, who was last seen alive and going to be taken into custody at the end of the film. Of course, the book of Goblet of Fire had him kinda-killed off. This was not done in the film, and thus you need to read the books in order for the continuous work of films to make sense.
- Not only back story is cut, but some events are treated very badly by the filmmakers. In GoF, the corpse of Barty Crouch Sr. is removed from the woods... only for him and his death to never be mentioned again. (Not even when the assassin reveals himself.)
- Speaking of the Crouches, the film changes Junior's back story from "believed to be dead" to "still imprisoned in Azkaban". Which may be very confusing for moviegoers who are now expected to believe he could have escaped with nobody noticing while the plot previous film revolved around another escape that was discovered instantly.
- Of course, time constraints seem to prevent 'minor' characters receiving NAMES; Tonks, for example, is known to movie-only fans as "Don't call me Nymphadora!". Yes, that's seriously as close as they get to giving her a name. Which, of course, due to the strangeness of it, most people wouldn't even recognise as a name, leaving her to be known as 'that pink-haired chick'.
- Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs. The movie never says who they are. Anyone who's read the book knows...
- Worse, Harry calls Pettigrew "Wormtail" in the Goblet of Fire movie without explanation. And Sirius is called "Padfoot" in OOTP.
- Not to mention that Dobby and Kreacher are confirmed to be MIA in Half-Blood Prince. Apparently Kreacher was to be excised from the OOTP movie as well, until JK stepped in and said "Yeah, you might need him later."
- Another one for Deathly Hallows: Bill and Fleur aren't in the Half-Blood Prince. The wedding that'll come out of nowhere seems bad enough. Then you see he's still got the scars
 ◊ of a werewolf attack that didn't occur on-screen...
- Because the movie excised the flashbacks into Snape's past, his pronouncement at the end of the film that he is the Half-Blood Prince makes very little sense. It's clear that this is why the book let Harry be so good at Potions, but even that is a minor subplot.
- Said to be why the 2009 Star Trek movie specifically sets itself as an origin story in a clear alternate continuity (if Hand Waved connected to the original through use of the Timey Wimey Ball)
- Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End doesn't make Will Turner's fate as depressing as most people think, as long as you know about one deleted scene. Or The Stinger.
- Movies based on comics start with the premise that the movie requires no knowledge of the comic since it's telling its own version of the story. That premise is quickly violated.
- Example: X-Men: Wolverine: Origins could have used footnotes to explain the significance of its story elements. Since the Weapon X scene was so brief, it could have said "To learn more, please read Weapon X by Barry Windsor-Smith." One benefit is that you get to spend more time with your girlfriend explaining the plot. Whether she'll dump you or not is another story.
- Films set in a historical period leave out a lot of information and twist facts to conform to the plot. You might assume the movie's presentation is accurate if you don't habitually check Wikipedia after the movie.
- This is very likely one of the reasons why the second and third chapters of The Matrix Trilogy are so polarizing. It is much, much better if you watch all three movies on consecutive nights or something. (Rather than, oh I don't know, with a four-year gap between parts one and two...)
- Peter Greenaway's Luperverse movies, The Falls, The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Drowning by Numbers and several short films, are a deliberate appeal to this trope. His main character, Tulse Luper, generates so much writing and ancillary material about himself (both in canon, and, via Greenaway, In Real Life as well) that no one can write his definitive biography. Lampshaded in his very first appearance in Vertical Features Remake, where a team of academics utterly fails to recreate a lost film Luper made while relying on vague notes and the memories of his collaborators.
Literature
- In another example of a creator locking himself out of his own continuity, John Varley, in an introduction to one of his Eight Worlds novels, admits that he's long since lost track of all the background details of the series, and has given up trying to make the later novels fully consistent with the early ones.
- Terry Pratchett said much the same in the introduction to the first edition of The Discworld Companion.
- The Wheel Of Time series is a dense example of this. As the series progresses, and both the cast and pagecount swell, individual characters get less and less face time. It's sometimes several hundred pages between a character's appearances, even for main characters. Worse, the characters have often been active in that time, leaving the reader to infer what happened since they were last seen. Not that we're bitter.
- In fact, it is quite clear that till the 4th book or so, each book provided info from previous books, inculding character development history and some important pieces of lore. However, by the 5th book, no more "backward compatibility" is provided and the writer assumes that readers have read the previous books.
- To the point of removing anyone three books or older from the glossary. I wouldn't mind if I could remember which of the 20 A-named female channelers was Aes Sedai, Rebel Sedai, Aeil, Seachan, or Dark-aligned. They tend to blur together after 10,000 pages or so.
- Isaac Asimov put the Foundation series on a decades-long hiatus in the 1950s in no small part because he found it tedious to work a synopsis of the previous stories in so that new readers would know what was going on. He also got fed up with having to reread the material himself to keep it consistent, not that it did him much good. A fan later handed him a long list of inconsistencies within the Foundation stories.
- Attempting to get into George R.R. Martin's A Song Of Ice And Fire involves going through four or more Door Stopper novels, each with so much continuity that it's no wonder the man is taking ages to continue the series. If he creates a plot hole, someone's going to try to call him on it before the book gets to the editor.
- Interestingly, the author later wrote two prequel novellas (with a third on its way), starting with The Hedge Knight which essentially reproduced the Ice and Fire themes about power and politics down to a much smaller and far easier-to-digest form, and radically less intimidating to newcomers, particularly the graphic novel adaptations.
- Also interesting to see how the apparently very faithful HBO TV adaptation (currently in production) handles the uber-serialised, densely-plotted structure and the vast cast of characters in the story.
- Stephen King hired author Robin Furth to be his archivist and continuity editor to assist him in writing the final books of The Dark Tower. She compiled an encyclopedia that King referred to during writing that was published itself as Stephen King's The Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance. He says in the Forward to that book that there was no way he could have completed the series without such a document.
- Perry Rhodan has a real problem with this. With a backstory of over 2500 issues in the main series alone that might become relevant for the current plot at any time and story arcs that last for 50 to 100 issues it can be quite hard for new readers to break into the series.
Live Action TV
- The Stargate franchise has been accused of this. A newbie coming it at the eighth season of Stargate SG-1, for instance, is going to need some help understanding who and what all those species are meant to be about. Some people almost gave up after sitting through the pilot episode — without seeing the movie first. "Who are all these people?!" Somehow it did not occur to the writers that it carried over a whopping six characters from the movie without bothering to give them any proper introduction, in addition to introducing five new major characters in this episode alone. The fact that they moved through Abydos and Chulak in large crowds didn't help. Starting with "Emancipation," when it became obvious that they were focusing on a four-person team, things started to look more manageable.
- Hence why Stargate Universe features an new cast in a new setting with few links back to the other series (really only cameos) and an different style: to capture new audiences. Of course, it may suffer from new Continuity Lockout itself later on, since it looks like it's developing an semi-serialized Myth Arc with a fairly large cast..but at least the creators weren't lazy and just decided to reboot it like some people did and instead tried to just expand the universe in new directions.
- Babylon 5 freely admitted that it was a "novel on television," and no one starts reading a novel in the middle.
- Most of the jokes on Arrested Development barely make sense unless you have an intimate knowledge of the episodes that have come before (and, in some cases, the ones that come after...).
- So bad in The X Files that even a paperback fan book couldn't sum up the mythology of some of the episodes in less than three pages.
- Fans of the show are forever locked into a debate as to which episodes are better, specifically the Mytharc verses the Monster Of The Week episodes. They're pretty evenly split between the seasons, with the Arc marketed more to the hardcore fans while the Monsters are marketed to the casual viewer, who is used to not keeping up with the show.
- The 2000s Battlestar Galactica. The series premiere follows immediately from the events of the pilot miniseries, which was not initially included on the Season 1 DVD, and any given episode relies on the viewer being aware of plot details introduced several episodes or seasons earlier.
- Except of course for some standalone episodes the execs insisted on having in the back halves of Seasons Two and Three. The majority of fans did not like this one bit.
- Lost. There's dozens of major and minor characters, all of whom have their own unique and complicated backstories. The fact that these backstories often intersect in unlikely (and often downright implausible) ways makes things even more confusing.
Hurley: Okay. See, we did crash, but it was on this crazy island. And we waited for rescue, and there wasn't any rescue. And there was a smoke monster, and then there were other people on the island. We called them the Others, and they started attacking us. And we found some hatches, and there was a button you had to push every 108 minutes or... well, I was never really clear on that. But... the Others didn't have anything to do with the hatches. That was the DHARMA Initiative. The Others killed them, and now they're trying to kill us. And then we teamed up with the Others because some worse people were coming on a freighter. Desmond's girlfriend's father sent them to kill us. So we stole their helicopter and we flew it to their freighter, but it blew up. And we couldn't go back to the island because it disappeared, so then we crashed into the ocean, and we floated there for a while until a boat came and picked us up. And by then, there were six of us. That part was true. But the rest of the people... who were on the plane? They're still on that island.
- Farscape, to the extent that this editor went on holiday, missed two episodes, and spent the rest of the season confused. The show would have been more successful if this trope hadn't intersected badly with Growing The Beard.
- According to articles, the network executives cancelled Farscape precisely because of the Continuity Lockout.
- Scrubs is fond of minor subplots that develop from episode to episode (Dr. Mickhead killing his wife, "the world's most giant doctor," Crazy Dr. Hooch and Dr. Kelso's family issues stand out), so that if you come across an episode with one of these b-plots, you'll miss a bit if you haven't seen a specific set of episodes before. The major plot points are fairly simple to follow, however.
- HBO's The Wire. Just try to start even three episodes into the first season, and you won't understand a thing.
- This trope is often blamed as one of the contributing factors to the cancellation of the original series of Doctor Who - amongst a lot of other issues that the show was facing at the time, the fact that a fairly large portion of the stories broadcast during the 1980s seemed to hinge upon the audience being aware of characters, events and storylines which hadn't been seen for upwards of ten or even twenty years didn't make the show any easier to watch. Matters weren't helped by the fact that this was well before VHS and DVD was prominent enough to allow people to catch up on the old stuff, and that a lot of this old stuff had been deleted from the archives anyway, meaning that even if the technology had existed, the original material didn't.
- In fairness, this was mostly a problem relating to the late Tom Baker years, which set up characters and storylines (like the Master's delayed final regeneration and the Daleks' ongoing attempts to capture or recapture Davros) that percolated all the way through Peter Davison and Colin Baker's eras, giving rise to some storylines lasting five or six years. The Sylvester Mccoy era did wipe the slate clean and in fact script editor Andrew Cartmel introduced his own four-season 'masterplan' of a self-contained arc which would explain the Doctor's true backstory and origins. Unfortunately, this was interrupted by the 25th Anniversary season, which was heavy on references to previous seasons (particularly Remembrance of the Daleks, which even hardcore Whovians have trouble making complete sense of), and then by the show's unannounced cancellation at the end of the 26th season. The conclusion to the 'masterplan' was eventually published as a novel, but its canonicity now seems doubtful.
- In the new series of Doctor Who, the later into any given series an episode occurs, the lower the likelihood of a casual viewer having any clue who the characters are or what is going on. The most extreme example is the three-part finale of series 4, the first episode of which ended with a cliffhanger: the Arc Words from the first series. We are then introduced to nearly every Companion or character who had appeared in multiple stories from the past four years, as well as a few of the main characters from the spin-off shows. Also, the Big Bad was a guy who had last been on the show back in the 1980s. With so much fanservice going on, there was not much time for explanations or plot, so we just had to accept that, say, Jack could get fed into an incinerator and emerge unharmed, or that for some reason Mickey and Jackie have magical teleporter buttons but nobody else has. This long-time fan spent most of the episode explaining everything that happened to her family, who had only seen most episodes of new!Who once, and hadn't seen much Torchwood or The Sarah Jane Adventures.
- Heroes. It's more comprehensible that way.
- Notably averted by 24, due to the fact that it is completely episodic. While there's always a terrorist doing something mean, the exact details of what's going on (and which evil minion Jack Bauer has to chase) are rarely relevant for more than the next hour. The nature of season one was far different, with characters and situations often running for two or three hours (meaning a plot point wasn't solved at the end of every hour), and a couple of narrative devices (the footage of Jamey Farrell's death) coming back ten or twelve episodes after they were last seen.
- Angel, from the end of the first season on, became increasingly arc-driven, to the point that season four required that you be familiar with many of the developments of the past two years to grasp the complexity of Jasmine's advance planning. Network execs reacted to this by insisting that season five be much more typical, revamping the entire location of the show and substantially modifying the mission of the main characters.
- As noted in its Film entry, the Star Trek franchise was reset precisely because of this trope. The original series and Star Trek The Next Generation largely averted this by focusing on standalone episodes that could be watched in (almost) any order, without sacrificing narrative. The movies also (to a large extent) avoided this, save for Star Trek First Contact (which assumed the viewer had some knowledge of the "Best Of Both Worlds" two-parter and Deep Space Nine for Worf's location during the cube battle). Star Trek Enterprise, however, took this trope to an extreme point by having many episodes only serve to tangle up continuity even further. There were also several episodes (largely during the fourth season) that attempted to solve plot holes and questions never addressed in the franchise.
- Ironically, the reboot takes place AFTER the events of Enterprise, making it the only part of the "old" Star Trek universe still that's still canon.
- In Treatment really requires the viewer to watch every episode in order, even if you don't like one (or more) characters and want to skip them from week to week. If you do not view every episode, you won't understand what's going on later in the week or in the series.
- Buffy could be somewhat guilty of this, especially during the fourth season and onwards. The most egregious example comes during This Year's Girl/Who Are You, where Faith re-appears. It's pretty much assumed that the viewer knows this fact, and despite this being lampshaded by newcomer Riley ("Who's Faith"), very little explanation is given, and you'd better be watching the spin-off too, 'cos otherwise you won't see the end of this mini-arc, to understand what the hell to make of Angel's appearance a few episodes later.
Newspaper Comics
- Nearly every Newspaper Comic in existence is written under the belief that not everyone gets the newspaper every day, so most of them are of a Gag-a-Day format to avoid this.
- Both Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse daily strips and Ward Greene's Scamp daily strips began as essentially one continuous story, but both eventually shifted to gag a day formats.
- That also makes them particularly tricky to separate into individual stories for reprinting in comic book form (besides the obvious fact that they have to make up a meaningful name for the story arcs), for example, Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse as the Monarch of Medioka (Printed in WDC #593-599 starts of with a conversation referring to the immediately preceding adventure, and the plot is set in motion by spending of the money they made off of said adventure. The preceding story, In Search of Jungle Treasure was printed in issues 4 and 5, so unless you have a complete collection, you pretty much have to take their word for it.
- Fleep was an Ontological Mystery, so the entire story was progressed through clues slowly gained over the various strips. It was canceled for being too confusing.
Video Games
- Metal Gear slowly rose from humble origins, into the self-sequels Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2, had a brief blip for the stand-alone Metal Gear Solid 3, and then gunned the canon whole-heartedly into the massive continuity snarl-ups of Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops and Metal Gear Solid 4, both of which only a very serious and dedicated fan would be able to understand totally.
- As a sort of alternative, the Ac!d games happened in an alternate universe, but they still expected a familiarity with the main phase series with its spoilerrific character cards. In the first game's story, a lot of hints about Snake's identity and motivations require some knowledge of his main phase canon backstory, such as his sterility.
- Some games or companies attempt to keep world bibles in order to allow their development teams to keep track of what is what in a setting. It works... sometimes.
- Strangely averted by The Legend Of Zelda. Despite having a humongous Continuity Snarl of a timeline, one can play both Twilight Princess and The Wind Waker without needing the knowledge that they are set in two parallel timelines created by Link's time travel in Ocarina of Time.
Web Animation
Webcomics
- Sluggy Freelance. Trying to understand the significance of things without going through an Archive Binge... just doesn't work. Sluggy Freelance may be the only webcomic where the creator forgot his keys and locked himself out of his own continuity. In his defense, the writer has become aware of this trope and provides relevant links at the bottom of the strip for anyone who hasn't gone through the eight plus years of continuity.
- Megatokyo. If you haven't read it from the beginning, you can forget about understanding the story. This is largely due to its character driven nature. If you haven't witnessed every second of Piro and Kimiko's courtship, or taken notes on each tiny nuance of the Piro/Miho dynamic, you aren't going to have any clue what's going on. Even then you might still have trouble, but that's another trope entirely
- Dominic Deegan, making the sheer dedication of the Hatedom all the more puzzling.
- Hate is as strong an attracting force as love. See the Fallout fandom, who hate every single thing about the series but will tear you apart if you try to take it from them.
- Penny And Aggie is a tapestry of numerous characters and subplots and overarching plots and rivalries...just read it from the beginning and you'll understand it better. The website now attempts to help those not planning on an Archive Binge by displaying a summary of the current plotline and the characters involved. The reader is still missing out on a wealth of backstory and characterization if they rely on that alone.
- Scary Go Round is coming to an end due to, in part, its massive archive keeping new readers at bay.
- Girl Genius has so many characters who can be summarized as "mad scientist", many of whom disappeared for several years and then resurfaced, that even after reading the entire archive it's hard to keep track of what's going on now.
Web Original
- Given the vagueness of the plot and the fact that all the episodes are online, lonelygirl15 would probably not be an example of this, if it wasn't for the tendency of seemingly irrelevant, blink-and-you'll-miss-it background details to become crucial Chekhov's Guns several hundred episodes later.
- Happens in Survival Of The Fittest a great deal. Sometimes, even starting at the beginning of the current version/season isn't enough - references will be made to scenes or characters in previous versions. It's often very bewildering for people seeing the RP for the first time.
- YTMND is largely like that due to excessive amount of in-jokes.
- 4chan Is arguably worse than the above YTMND. Memes used by long-time users will bewilder and confuse new
fagsfriends. The solution to all this confusion? LURK MOAR.
- Arguable with the Whateley Universe, since it now consists of over a hundred stories, most of them novel or novella length. Every major protagonist has a backstory, and girls of Team Kimba all have backstory novels. Diving in with current stories means you may not get the in-jokes, or the references to prior stories, or what's going on with recurring characters, or some of the ongoing plotlines, like Ayla's blackmailer or Jade's quest, or the people who may be after Toni.
Western Animation
- One of the many complaints people had about Beast Wars is that when it aired, it had the strongest continuity ever seen in a cartoon on American or Canadian TV. As a result, a new viewer jumping in partway through is going to be quite perplexed by what's all going on.
Repeatedly Used On This Very Wiki
- Oh, it happens here. Somewhere, there is someone asking a friend to explain what is meant by: "I was Squicked by that Epileptic Tree about The Dragon who refused to cross the Moral Event Horizon, so his overlord went all Bad Boss on him." This is one of the reasons we always wiki those words, so new people can understand what the hell we're saying. Of course, those trope pages explain them in terms of more tropes, ad infinitum... TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Vocabulary, you know.
- For the first time reader coming across 20-50% blue articles, those pot holes still make for an initially very bumpy ride. This is effectively Continuity Lockout for any newbie until they get familiar enough with the terminology not to bat an eye at the blue jargon.
- The Tropes Of Legend index was created in part to offer new readers a place to start, but suffers from the problem of being linked almost nowhere, especially since new readers generally discover the wiki by being linked to a specific trope page rather than the Home Page.
- It does not help that tropes are often renamed. For instance, Moral Event Horizon was originally known as "Rape The Dog".
|
|
