Memes / TV Tropes

"They wanted to play 'memes' with the old school.
Now there are tears."

— Fast Eddie

Describe TV Tropes here.
Okay, but it'll be really hard.

...

That's What She Said.

Want further proof that TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life? Just take a look at all of the egregious memes that we've spawned. Don't worry... you'll eventually start using these in time.

Since these are in-jokes, you'd be hardpressed to find them outside of TV Tropes, but within, they are memetic.

Naturally, many of these are Repeatedly Used On This Very Wiki. (Including that one.)

Remember that trope names are often built off of existing references or memes, or are chosen to match what people would "naturally" call something, so it can sometimes be difficult to untangle whether a memetic trope name originated on TV Tropes or was merely spread by it.

(If you are unfamiliar with some of these, you probably don't visit our forums.)

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• You're troping again!
• Troll Post.
• Tropes can be considered as memes in and on themselves.
• Referring to Wikipedia as The Other Wiki or That Other Wiki.
• A Trope Launch Pad meme occurs when someone makes a blank post, after which people start complaining that we already have Dada Comics, and supplying examples of the proposed trope in various media (inevitably including John Cage's 4:33). This is because the TLP draft for Dada Comics was actually started this way.
• Look no further than Wild Mass Guessing: Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory and Altaïr, who kills everything. Everyone is also a Time Lord and Haruhi Suzumiya, and living inside the subconscious of both Tommy Westphall and Shinji Ikari.
  • Martin Van Buren really was a Time Lord.
  • Look. No. Further. William "Bootstrap Bill" Turner IS A TIME LORD. Who makes EVERYONE THEIR TARDIS on TV Tropes!
  • Also, everyone is Ash's father. Who I have heard really gets around.
    • As an extension, everyone will start beeping in 57 minutes.
  • And Spiral Energy and Shinigami are the gears that make it work.
  • They're only a Time Lord if you can say what their TARDIS is. For example, Fast Eddie is a Time Lord, and TV Tropes is his TARDIS.
• This wiki also spawned a minor memetic mutation regarding the game Prey. After Nezumi casually pointed out the significant usage of sphincters and sphincter-like structures in the Womb Level portions of Prey, it's become a running gag to make references to sphincters any time it's mentioned on the wiki. At one point, the Sphere the game takes place in was referred to in an entry as "the sphinctership."
• Trope Name In Jokes.
• On my deathbed, I will whisper, "(old name for renamed trope)".
  • "Rape The Dog." I sincerely hope no one confuses this for my dying wish.
  • "You Fail Biology Forever." And I for one hope that the doctors won't take it as a final insult.
• Crowning Moment Of Awesome has become a recognizable meme in certain corners of the Internet.
  • Linkara mentioned it.
  • And, to a lesser extent, Dethroning Moment of Suckinvoked.
  • Probably hit critical mass when it was used for a gag in Shortpacked!
  • Exceeded critical mass when an article in Esquire was called "TV's Crowning Moments of Awesome."
  • As the one who started the whole CMOA thing in the first place, Weaver is fully aware that they have created a monster and is happier about it than they probably should be.
• Similarly, but not as much, Rule of Cool gets used in other corners of the Internet.
• Due to fortunate Clothing Damage in the Fantastic Four movies, we have come to the conclusion that even the laws of physics want to see Jessica Alba naked.
• (Abortion of reality that will haunt every waking moment or your dreams). You're welcome.
• X Ensues. It's not always hilarity.
  • Hilarity Ensues could kind of count on its own; a lot of times it's mentioned, hilarity does, in fact, ensue.
    • Pot Hole-ing to Hilarity Ensues in cases of extreme violence.
• "troll post removed". (On the forums, anyway)
  • Also on the forums: This post was thumped by the Stick of Off-Topic Thumping.
• As a discussion involving trope names progresses, the probability of one of the following tropes being mentioned approaches one:
  • Jonas Quinn
  • Rape The Dog
    • Also, in the "page history" sections, "Rape the Dog is dead".
• The Perfect Trumpet Thingy from the Courage the Cowardly Dog Nightmare Fuel pages is becoming a memetic nightmare-giver. Any Trope including nightmares, surrealism, or it's very image alone will result in SOMEONE commenting how scary it is.
  • The name is also a TV Tropes brand nickname.
• After the TV Tropes Wiki Drinking Game noted the popularity of the word "egregious" on the Wiki, someone decided to Pot Hole the next instance of "egregious" they wrote to that very drinking game. Before long, half the instances of "egregious" were linked there. This was eventually taken to its logical conclusion: "Egregious" was created, first as a redirect to the TV Tropes Wiki Drinking Game, and then as its own page. The word has also crept into trope titles, such as The Egregious Trope-Man (which has now been renamed The Adjectival Superhero).
• Describe Meme here. It's a phrase that gets repeated until repeating it is an end in itself.
  • Even though Describe Topic Here has been replaced with "Click the edit button to start this new page", this meme is still used for self-demonstrating openings to articles, and "Click the edit button..." hasn't escaped this fate either.
• The Advertisement Server is TV Tropes' own Memetic Badass. Or at least, Memetic Wiseass. Giving Made Of Wins to said server became so popular, it got its own honorary contributor page and a separate Made of Win section just for it, dubbed Ad of Win.
  • Xanatos and Light Yagami planned EVERYTHING.
• Ciaphas Cain, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!
  • Captain Gordon, Defender of Earth!
  • Also, always write DAN GREEN!!! and BRIAN BLESSED in capital letters (especially the latter!)
  • Let's not forget Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer!
  • Any sentence... which... mentions... William Shatner... must be riddled... with... dramatic pauses.
  • Ace Rimmer (what a guy!).
  • Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann always being emphasized.
  • Princess Luna and her ROYAL CANTERLOT VOICE!
  • GlaDOS' speech pattern looks like he'll to edit.
  • Not only are we contractually obligated to remind you about Fabius Bile's labcoat (it's made of human skin, since you asked), we're contractually obligated to remind you about our contractual obligation thereof.
• On the old forums, sex-related derails, sometimes described as "Tropers Are Horny Bastards". Forced derails tend to take the form of references to orange juice and Diablo II, following an attempt to derail the Fetishes thread.
  • The phrase "TAKE THAT SHIT TO FETISHES" has become a meme itself, whenever someone thinks that a sex related derail is imminent. Now known as "Get thee to The Nunnery!".
• Every thread will eventually derail into discussions about sex, Neon Genesis Evangelion, or Haruhi. No exceptions. One of these things is not found in a brothel...
  • You forgot Joss Whedon works.
  • Hell, "No exceptions" is a meme in itself.
  • And Neon Genesis Evangelion has since given way to Touhou Project, and then Homestuck.
    • Does this mean that we're no longer allowed to mention our Ayanami Rei x Nagato Yuki lesbian bondage fantasies any more?
• In the Skyrim thread, 'acid sacks' (from a discussion about Weird Argonian Biology), and 'wrong ears' (The Dark Elves' ears apparently point the wrong direction in Skyrim).
• Wild Mass Guessing that actually makes sense. Crazy, I know.
  • [Blatantly canon guess]
    • That's ridiculous/you'll need more proof than that.
• Tropers often refer to themselves in the third person: "This Troper". Not to be confused with "That Troper". The jocular "This Vigilante Taxonomist" is also occasionally seen, in reference to a forum thread in which a user accused Tropers of being vigilante taxonomists. Note that doing either this or referring to yourself in the first person has been strongly discouraged on the wiki for quite a while now.
  • Also, Report Siht.
• IMDB never lies.
  • Except when it does.
• On the forums: Fedora fedora fedora.
  • Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich.
• "Hey, what anime should I watch?" ''TwinPeaks''.
• Other forum memes include fire, "Akufen — The Dragonfly Who Thought He Was A Mockingbird" and "rats".
• Plus the Reispin meme. Now the tripped-out Rei face is a forum-symbol for both the Just for Fun subforum and, as one troper put it, "Descents into stygian madness."
  • Which originally took this form◊.
  • Now in Homestuck Flavor◊!
  • Puella Magi Madoka Magica Edition!◊
• Honor Harrington is Horatio Hornblower...In Space!
• Arguably TV Tropes ruining people's lives has become a meme itself. It's been mentioned on xkcd, and other miscellaneous sites
• Haven is The Protagonist of Real Life.
• HAY ZUDAK
  • LET'S HAVE HAWT, NASTY SEX THAT VIOLATES EVERY LAW OF PHYSICS. LITERALLY.
  • Which, of course, spawned: HAY [AOD], HAY CELEBRAIN, HAY AONDEUG, HAY IS FOR HORSES, NEEDLE, HAY HAY HAY, HAY RIDLEY, HAY GUYZ, and a few others. A few of them (the big ones) were actually saved by the Troper, Pacific, and made downloadable so that we could save this piece of craziness for posterity, after they got deleted.
• "I Am Not Making This Up" used to be a meme, but it got so overused that it ended up as a Discredited Meme. We now call it "The Phrase That Shall Not Be Potholed".
  • Similarly, saying "X does not exist" while potholing to Discontinuity was once a meme, but became discredited after being overused and widely agreed to be irritating. The split into Fanon Discontinuity and Canon Discontinuity sealed the meme's fate.
• During the short-lived movie nights on the forums, it was popular to accuse various objects in the movies of being SNAKES! This started during the Snakes on a Plane movie night, when the tropers realized that it took the movie around 30 minutes to show a single snake.
  • THIS ARTICLE IS SNAKES!
• In Doctor Who recaps, it's comm-WOOOOOOOOSSSSSSSH. For some inexplicable reason.
• On the forum, any sentence saying "Thanks to this post of mine, you now know something that you didn't know before!" is likely potholed to And Knowing Is Half the Battle.
• Putting "I came here from TV Tropes" at comment section of any Youtube video is becoming this.
  • It's the top-rated comment for this video, with (at time of writing) about 300 votes, linked from So Unfunny, It's Funny.
  • This video is linked from Bound and Gagged, and almost every comment mentions TV Tropes. It's now reached a critical mass, and newer comments express surprise that every comment really does mention TV Tropes.
• Warhammer 40,000 is becoming a trope of its own, usually related to Darker and Edgier.
• I hate memes from the fora too. Fuck that guy.
• Marking that a trope is being egregiously used within a work by adding the phrase "And how!" as description to an example, usually with some kind of misplaced italics. Further repetitive use of the same tropes will lead to a promotion to "but of COURSE!"
• Samuel L. Jackson, while only having one arm, beat up the "T. rex" in Jurassic Park, and forced him to provide the Deus ex Machina ending. This was cut from the final print of the movie because it was so awesome, test audiences' heads kept on exploding.
  • Every time exploding heads are mentioned, it's imperative to mention Darryl Revok.
• "(insert controversial statement) Your Mileage May Vary" used to be a meme, but was taken out for being nattery and controversial.
• Hello!. My Name Is Inigo Montoya. You Killed My Father. Prepare to Die.
  • To elaborate, Hello! was made specifically because it was the only part of that quote that wasn't in blue.
  • Even the following line, Stop Saying That!, is a trope.
• Putting Jesus dies in spoiler tags. Don't want to spoil the ending for all you Protestants out there.
  • Or that He gets better.
• Looking for the latest Anime or some sweet music? Whatever you do, make sure to obtain it through Perfectly Legal Means!
• Please, no Complaining About Memes You Don't Like on this page.
• Your Mileage May Vary, as the work was very polarizing.

• It's THE GREAT MOTHERFUCKING PUMPKIN!
• I'm surprised nobody has mentioned being surprised about something nobody has mentioned yet yet.
  • There's a person, of all people, who was in a show, of all shows, who used this meme, of all memes, where they show that they show that it is surprising, of all emotions, that this was an example of a trope, of all things.
  • Don't forget "Not to mention", and lest we forget something you've never heard of.
• Cpt. Louis Renault is shocked - shocked - to see that gambling is going on in here.
• Man Without A Body started using the phrase "That is all" for examples that were Self-Explanatory or exactly what they said on the tin. The whole thing was done with quite a John Hodgman influence, as it's one of his catch phrases. The phrase has spread a bit across the wiki.
• The page on Left Fielder had become just a place for endless Memetic Mutation of whatever you want, until the examples were cut.
• You Fail X Forever, leading to the Laconic entry: X DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY! GOODNIGHT!
• From the now-defunct Troper Tales:
  • Anecdotes would draw the response "Are you me?" from the like-minded and "will you marry me?" from those who liked what they read.
  • "[Character/Person] causes this type of Fetish Fuel, which concerns this otherwise entirely straight [same gender] troper who isn't into that in Real Life."
  • The fact that in the TV Tropes Nightmare Fuel page, it's revealed that Brother–Sister Incest once had an (empty) Troper Tales page, as if somebody was expecting it to be filled in at some point.
• An X that is so overflowing with memes that it needs its own section.
• Pot Holing to a different article with every single word in a sentence or phrase.
• Thanks to the forum wordfilter, variations on the phrase "Sorry, I skipped some posts." are now common. Less widely used is "I am too lazy, or possibly too incapable, to actually read anything. I resent the fact that this makes me seem like an inconsiderate person and hereby pledge to resume taking my ADHD medication."
• Fast Eddie will shut that shit down.
  • Do you think he is playing? He was. Until he wasn't a year later.
• Say, have you tried Touhou Project—*shot*
• Another forum meme: A while ago, a troll spammed some boards with topics titled "Why is X", where X is typically a minority group or religion or something. After his banning, "Why is?" rose to prominence.
• Image caption: [Character] shows us how it's done.
  • [Character] tells it as it is.
• Bonus points for awarding points to your entries.
• Topic make me make this face.◊ *image of Osaka staring blankly*
• TV Tropes is practically the poster child for this.
• In the case of F.A.T.A.L.:
  • Any discussion about the "game"'s Chaos Magic will eventually lead to jokes about summoning "randy gay ogres".
  • Stabs at Byron Hall's claims of "historical accuracy" will be met with screams of REALISM! Often corrupted: REALISTIANALCIRCUMFRENCE!
  • Whenever the eponymous spell—which kills everything in the game's universe—comes up, it is inevitably referred to as a Mercy Kill or otherwise being for the best.
  • It's cloaca time!
• An example of a trope taken "to its logical conclusion/extreme" or "up to eleven", which is often a trope exaggerated or lasts longer than would really be necessary. One example being "what if a tsundere character stayed tsundere, even after growing up, marrying, and having a child?"
• He broke 33 pencils in his life, and had a good friend break two of those pencils because they were too hard.
  • "Consta-Kid".
• When Large Hams are mentioned, there will be allusions to different kinds of pork-based foodstuffs, and quite often related puns on actor/character names, as well as scenery ingestion wordplay.
• Referring to your overly cuddly bisexual friend as OCBF.
• TV Tropes misspelled as TV Trops. You've probably done it at least once.
• Every time a programming problem in the wiki happens, when Fast Eddie fixes it, he is being fast as usual.
• (I knew who made this thread) "Before I even clicked on it!"
  • Indeed.
• Variations on the phrase "FUCK the SHIT out of her" have become popular on the It Just Bugs Me! forum. ^Explanation The original statement was "If you saw her you would want to FUCK the SHIT out of her. Chick was a dime."
• TV Tropes is a buttload more informal.
• Fake Potholes on Fora.
• It seems like every time TV Tropes crashed, it went "bork" or "was borked".
• So who came from the {enter tvtropes page here} page on tvtropes?
  • So who came from the {enter subpage within tvtropes page here} subpage of the {enter tvtropes page here} page on tvtropes?
    • (YouTube) Featured on TV Tropes!
• P. Diddy caused everything evil in the world. He's now to evil what Altair is to death. ^Explanation A woman sued P. Diddy claiming he caused 9/11 and stole a poker chip worth $100 zillion from her.
• Linking to TV Tropes from an outside site will inevitably spawn comments along the lines of "Whatever plans I had to do anything productive today have pretty much been shot all to hell now."
  • Also "Don't click this link" or "Click if you dare" are common.
  • "Must...not...click..on...trope...link."
• "Is it God Knows...?" An illegal guess in the Anime Theme Song Game, where you have to guess the OP/ED ("God Knows" is an insert song).
  • "Are there aliens/time travellers/espers?" Evidently, Haruhi's search criteria work pretty well in-game.
• [Trope Name]: The Movie (or This is practically [Trope Name]: The Movie!) as an alternative to Trope Codifier (usually cos it's taken).
• Too bad. Waluigi Time.
• NOT UNPOPULAR!
  • Originally a response to Opinion Myopia in the "Unpopular Opinions" threads at the forum. Has since spread to memetic uses elsewhere.
• "You needed to know this." A meme from the forum's (now locked) "Trash Heap" thread.
• Full stop, full stop.
• Whenever there's a link to something scary and/or disturbing someone is likely to write: "Yeah right, as if X could be really that bad-HOLY SHIT ." or anything similar.
• In the Fan Fic recs pages, the Sturgeon's Law phrase "The remaining ten percent is worth dying for," is replaced by something more suitable for the fandom. For example, "I'm commander Shepard and these are my favorite Fan Fictions on the internet." or The Remaining ten percent is worth getting tanged for. Or even "Proof that the remaining ten percent is worth being sent to the moon for.
• "My head is full of fuck." ^Explanation In OTC, in a thread about CERN discovering a particle that may be faster than the speed of light, the scientific discussion rose to such a high level of theoretical science that this phrase became the go-to expression when someone didn't understand. It has been spreading slowly ever sense as OTC regulars use it as a sort of in-joke.
• [Insert Trope Here]: And how!
  • [Name], Just [Name]
  • Alternately: [Name}, Oh dear God [Name]!
    • "God" is often replaced by whoever is considered a major deity in that related 'verse, most notably Arceus when discussing Pokémon.
  • [Name]: Boy howdy!
• Also Truth in Television! ^Explanation A minor Running Gag on the Warp That Aesop page. When an aesop becomes something sufficiently dark, depressing and maybe, just maybe a little funny, this is the response to that aesop's warpedness...to put it another way, tropers are not a happy people.
• LIME MAN! ^Explanation During the Echo Chamber Alternate Reality Game, a typo on one of Mr. Administrator's tweets caused the creation of this fictional superhero, many hoping he'd be picked to guard the Wall.
• What.
• Did someone order a Large Ham?
• Justifying Edit
  • To be fair, (insert sentence).
  • Granted, (insert sentence).
• Using the word "befriend" or any similar term to refer to Defeat Means Friendship.
• Brain Bleach is often mentioned.
• You can watch here... only if you are in America
• 'Look no further than (strong example of trope)'. It's even on this page.
• "Complaining About X You Don't Like".
  • "(Insert) fuel".
• IN SPACE! The formatting is strictly necessary.
• Whenever the Stroggification scene in Quake IV is mentioned, a link to it will be provided, often in a very cheerful manner. Watch it here!
• Despair in musical form ^Explanation A description of Heavy Lobster's theme from Kirby Super Star Ultra. Videos of it received quite a few comments referencing it until it was removed from NightmareFuel.Kirby due to new standards.
• And yes, this show does, in fact, air on PBS Kids. ^Explanation A caption for the image on NightmareFuel.Ready Jet Go, which was removed (along with the image and later the page). The image was a shadowed close-up of the character Zerk smirking. The image and its caption were widely mocked both onsite and elsewhere for their Faux Horrific nature.
• Avatar Cults ^Explanation A forum meme in which people will change their avatars to fit a particular theme and overtake the forums temporarily. It started with a Fidough cult and has becoming a running joke from there.

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Statler: Say, why is it that we always have to show up at the end of these articles?
Waldorf: Simple! They wouldn't shut up otherwise!
Both: Do-Ho-Ho-Ho-Hoh!

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