Referenced By / TV Tropes

Oh look! It's us!

"Oh my god! TV Tropes used one of my quotes!"

— Linkara, review on Daredevil #306 (once again using one of his quotes)

It's no surprise that the TV Tropes Wiki is one of the most popular websites on the Internet,^note (as of the last time we checked, we're 1,917th on Similarweb) and, equally, it's no surprise that other webpages want to give us a Shout-Out, or that we would want to return the favor by shouting back to the pages that reference us.

Also see Weirdest Inbound Link of the Day.

Note: Many terms and concepts used on this site have been around since before this site ever even existed, so be sure to check if a reference is definitely about this website before adding it as an example. A mention of the name TV Tropes would count, but just the word "trope", even in the sense we use it, wouldn't.

---

Comic Books

• The comic series The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye has had three references to TV Tropes so far, in the form of drinks. Issue #11 had "Nightmare Fuel", issue #13 had "Mood Whiplash", and issue #18 had "Berzerker Button". Should be noted that Roberts is known to visit here on occasion.
• Loki: Agent of Asgard knows their tropes. Not only is an early chapter called "Let's You and Him Fight", but the following chapter has an airplane passenger read "Movietropes.com" ("You will never leave") and check out the trope "Something On The Wing" (which admittedly doesn't exist... yet) when that trope happens to himself.

Fan Works

• Thinking In Little Green Boxes has Harry Potter celebrate when he learns we made a page for the fic here. He even passes out a link to the page to everyone.
• The Doctor Who fic series This Time Round:
  • Storytime The Speckled Band, has Baby Mel shout "Did somebody order A LARGE HAM?" when BRIAN BLESSED Expy Prubert Gastridge appears as the villain.
  • Another TTR story states at the bottom that it was written purely because the This Time Round entry said there wasn't a genderbent 'Round.
• Several chapters of Shinji And Warhammer 40 K refer to several tropes.
• Gregg Landsman, author of Nobody Dies, has referenced tropes in his story multiple times. For instance, Iruel greeting Asuka with "Hey there Woobie, how's Mommy treating you?", and Shinji somewhat-sarcastically referring to himself as a "Big Damn Hero". He even has a link to the trope page for Nobody Dies in the signature of his spacebattles.com account.
• Kyon: Big Damn Hero is a story that is described as a crossover between Haruhi Suzumiya and TV Tropes. Based on the massive number of tropes listed on the Main Trope page for the story, not to mention several tropes referred to by name.
• The author of Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami was apparently pleased to find our entry on it. Dark randomly declares himself a "sutle [sic] Magnificent Bastard" as a Take That! to the wiki claiming Dark had no subtle gambits, and we're suddenly told Near did a lot of supposedly evil things after TV Tropes claimed Near did nothing worthy of his Chew Toy status. Later, he thought it was awesome that Slowzombie is liveblogging it, Slow's eye problems notwithstanding.
• The round-robin, multibranching fic Switching Places/Eva! on the Anime Addventure. In this Neon Genesis Evangelion/Ranma ½ crossover, Rei Ayanami has begun using "TVTropes.jp" as a tool to help her understand human interactions. It's unclear whether this is a good idea or not.
• Progress has the author reccommend us to any readers who want to know what Cutie Mark Failure Insanity Syndrome is. Later we see 'Trope's Library of Literary Tools' in Celestia's library.
• Another Pony fic is outright titled Shipping Goggles.
• Fanfiction author Shadow Crystal Mage makes constant references to tropes by name, and admits outright that his goal is to be referenced on as many pages as possible.
• The Secret Life of Dolls has an installment titled after the trope He Who Fights Monsters. (Example is not an Older Than They Think. Cleo links to the article.)
• Princess Tutu Abridged often refers to tropes by name. An entire sub-plot was created because of a single run through the Shipping Tropes. It's the Shipping Bridge! And being put in a Cargo Ship is the worst thing that can happen. But no worries, the the entire plot is now focusing on Duck and Fakir. Drusselmeyer hates it.
• Total Drama Equestria has Izzy at various points flat out asking people to edit the TV Tropes page for the story, even begging in some cases.
• The Many Secret Origins of Scootaloo does a meta chapter with an author insert where Twilight insults him and says he doesn't deserve a TV Tropes page. The author gets very sad and cries.
• RHJunior's My Little Pony fanfics occasionally quote trope names verbatim, such as this quote from The Rise of Darth Vulcan (and yes, the capital letters are there in the original):
  ...no matter where you were the atmosphere could swerve from a cloying sugarbowl into a nasty round of Reality Ensues without warning.
• The Bridge: When faced with an unfamiliar situation, Discord conjures up a Kindle and looks up the fic's own TV Tropes page to get himself up to date, and even mentions the usernames of some of the fic's editors.
• Man of Dreams: the author mentions TV Tropes in the first author's note and later references the fact that TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life.
  May I again recommend checking out a certain wonderful site called TVTropes? [sic] It will ruin your life. But in a good way.
• In Death Note: The Abridged Series (kpts4tv), Raye Penber uses TV Tropes to aid in the Kira investigation:
  Raye Penber: So far all I have is from TV Tropes. Did you know that Kira means glitter in Japanese?
• Ebott's Wake mentions the website by name during a conversation.
  "TV Tropes has like half a dozen entries on that alone on the [Ace Attorney] movie page."
• Mario Luigi And Gary contains several references to TV Tropes. Bowser of all people seems to be a troper, describing his new minion as a Psycho for Hire in those exact words!

Films — Live-Action

• The Netflix special Attack of the Hollywood Clichés is essentially a review of various TV Tropes articles such as the Wire Dilemma, Cowboy Cop, Fatal Family Photo, Mirror Scare, Red Right Hand, Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and The Smurfette Principle with commentary from various Hollywood actors, directors, and movie critics. As the title indicates, it takes a decidedly more hostile view on the tropes it discusses than TV Tropes itself does, often criticizing them from an Anvilicious left-wing perspective. On this website, the more neutral view that Tropes Are Tools predominates — most of the time.
• Searching: The web address "tvtropes.org/pmwiki.php/Main/Searching" pops up when David is typing "tumblr" in his URL address bar for a brief moment.

Literature

• Black, White and Shades of Mediochre features a character named Xanatos Gambit. No, really. First name Xanatos, second name Gambit. Since the character is a Nerd in Evil's Helmet and the author reads TV Tropes, the reference is certainly intentional.
• A brief one in book five of Charles Stross's The Laundry Files, The Rhesus Chart. A mathematician who was given a certain line of calculations to visualize wakes up to find himself unusually photosensitive, possessed of superhuman reflexes and mind-warping abilities, invisible in the mirror...and thirsty for blood. Naturally, his reaction after calming down from a rather understandable freakout is to check Wikipedia and TVTropes for information on vampires.
• We Can't Rewind thanks TV Tropes on its Acknowledgements page "for bringing me considerable insight into just how thin the barrier between fiction and reality truly is."
• Gary Karkofsky, protagonist of The Supervillainy Saga mentions TV tropes and specific tropes several times during his adventures. C.T. Phipps is notably a troper on the site.

Live-Action TV

• TV Tropes began with covering Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which would mention tropes by name throughout the series. With the release of Season Ten Episode 4 in the comics, it's come full circle with Willow and Andrew discussing Dark Willow as a trope where it becomes a Running Gag, before Andrew says he's not Captain Obvious and Spike goes I Need a Freaking Drink.

Printed Media, Blogs, and other Publications

• This Huffington Post article discussing positive representation of dark-skinned women in Black Panther (2018) features a link to Mammy.
• The September 2010 issue of Wired magazine featured a short article on us.
  A visit to TVT&I will teach you three things: (1) originality is dead, (2) no one misses it, and (3) you've just blown six hours.
• Wired's September 2012 article on the Alternate Reality Game.
• Scans_daily mentions us a lot, especially in the comments (usually a link, accompanied by LOTS of warnings about life-ruining side effects.)
• Been mentioned in the editorial for the January edition of SFX magazine.
• Raocow has occasionally referenced us in his Lets Plays. In a video, after mentioning "Epileptic Trees", he outright tells people to visit the site.
• On Reddit.
• David Sirota of Salon linked to our page on the Noble Savage in his February 2013 list of major Academy Award-nominated or -winning films from the past quarter-century. He referred specifically to Dances with Wolves as "the modern era's emblematic example" of films whose protagonist "went native" among Noble Savages.
• Allen Varney blogged about the site on Paranoia.
• MetaFilter likes us too, apparently.
• Let's hope the NaNoWriMo writers don't waste their time on TV Tropes when they should be writing.
• The site was reviewed on Killer Startups.
• Fritz Freiheit wrote about the site on his blog. He included a copy of the blog post on his wiki.
• The Hekman Library includes the site as a research resource.
• A blog called Grim Reviews.
• Bruce Sterling mentioned us on Wired blogs.
• This Boing Boing front-pager sticks out a bit.
• The BBC even referenced this site in its comedy blog. Its favorite trope, apparently, was Trapped by Mountain Lions.
• The Viking's Progress, a blog by a Physician Assistant gives us a shout out here
• This Touhou Project fansite references some tropes and warns about the dangers of Trope Addiction with every link to this site. It's a Troper Work, and the main site of Touhou Nekokayou.
• A Semantic Web researcher discovers that we have the Linked Data nature,and that we may be able to teach the experts a thing or two about building data webs. Maybe this is why it's so addictive.
• At least one mention on a Television Without Pity recap, not to mention their forums.
• German weekly newspaper Die Zeit
• Cartoon Brew mentions TV Tropes in its article "How Can We Make Adult Animation Truly Adult?", criticising the way some animation is treated by the site (at the time, since it was published in 2013), but otherwise calling it a good resource.
• Cracked:
  • An article on bullshit stereotypes, linking to Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys and British Teeth.
  • On implausible TV and movie plots that actually happened linking to Switched at Birth.
  • They even have a page on us.
  • In the October 2010 Cracked contest for what the movie posters would look like for certain web sites, we had the winning poster.
  • Another Photoshop bit postulates TV Tropes the Board Game.
  • And another found our Kryptonite (We're #13).
  • The article on insulting adaptations of female characters has a reference to TV Tropes and a link to the Wolverine Publicity page.
  • TV Tropes is mentioned in a far less flattering light in this article, which argues that the Tropers posting in the Real Life categories often have no idea what the real world is actually like.
  • The article about awesome movie scenes that actually happened in real life links to "Ramming Always Works" when talking about the #2 item, which was about a US ship ramming into a German U-boat and winning during World War II.
• The Agony Booth referenced a few trope titles in their review of Repo! The Genetic Opera, then page 5 features this tidbit:
  This song is just awful, so much so that TV Tropes, which is run by people who like everything, lists this scene as Repo's Dethroning Moment of Suckinvoked.
• Here's a thing from io9, a great online 'zine for all things SFnal and cool.
• Dragonfree lovingly peppers her movie reviews with links to tropes that pop up in the Pokemon films.
• The LA Times had a look at us.
• Know Your Meme used this site to confirm if YouTube Poop was a meme. It's not just YTP, though. There are at least five other articles that have mentioned or linked back to this wiki.
• Arcade, Stanford University's salon magazine, has a write-up about us.
• Major online newspaper Slate.com has reference not once, not twice, not thrice, but a bunch of times:
  • Here under "a dog to kick".
  • A now-deleted page referring to xkcd referring to us.
  • In this podcast.
  • An explicit reference and link here in an article about Lady Gaga's use of Naughty Nuns.
  • Two more links come from a lengthy examination of the Dead Horse moving to Forgotten Trope of Quicksand in media.
• Amazing Ben has referenced this site in some of his articles.
• The site received an entry in the 2011 edition of Schott's Almanac, a catalogue of recent events, trends and phenomena, along with a list of some of the tropes present here.
• The Febuary 2011 issue of Maximum PC includes this site on a list of 101 websites everyone should see once.
• Wired's Geekdad recommends TVTropes to keep kids reading over the summer.
• The "distributed recommendation system" Skipforward provides a linked-data wrapper for TVTropes called DBTropes. Among other things, it provides a machine-readable interface to the wiki.
• Ralph Keyes mentions TV Tropes in the bibliography of his book Euphemania—though there's no mention in the main text.
• In this article in The Guardian on fanfiction, there's a direct reference to the trope Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls.
• The Macintosh Garden page for Lexi-Cross includes the game description from TVTropes.
• Nintendo Gamer Issue 76 references Contractual Boss Immunity in an article on boss battles.
• Whedonistas: A Celebration of the Worlds of Joss Whedon by the Women who Love Them includes several trope references, the most notable being Nancy Kay Shapiro's essay on why Spike is her Woobie.
• The University of Southern California digital news magazine has an article about TV Tropes here. [1]
• Entertainment Weekly's Sept. 20/27, 2013 issue mentions us in their B- review of the then-upcoming CBS sitcom Mom, criticizing its Flat Characters as something "tvtropes.org could've drafted".
• This post at the Anime Feet blog criticizes our former Does Not Like Shoes page.
• Apparently Mark Rosewater, Head Designer for Magic: The Gathering, thinks we are "awesome".
• In the August 2014 issue of Otaku USA, Jason Bradley Thompson's review of Dragonar Academy has this reference:
  Every element of this story feels ripped off from a TVTropes page, from the tsundere love interest who's cold on the outside (the love interest isn't the dragon, incidentally), to the evil technological Empire whose secret agents wield Uzis while everyone else is running around in pseudo-European garb.
• In a National Review column on the 2016 US Presidential election, Jim Geraghty discusses how 24 Anti-Hero Jack Bauer refused to cross the Moral Event Horizon by killing an eleven-year-old child, complete with a link to the trope page.
• NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day article for August 23, 2016 [2] links to the That's No Moon article.
• Rose Wild's "Feedback" column in The Times of 5 August 2017 answers a reader's question regarding the meaning of the word 'trope', making reference to "TVtropes.org, an entertaining and admirable wiki". Though she does include the caveat:
  While innumerable examples of all these spring to mind, I can't help feeling that filmgoers who spend their time trope-spotting rather than following the plot may be missing some of the finer points of the art form, but to each his own.
• Sunday Comics Debt has an article on the overuse of of Say My Name in comics and how it can devolve into Rocky Roll Call, with characters who already know each other stating their names and abilities for the readers' benefit. The article links to So Bad, It's Good, Evil Overlord List, and Breakout Character.
• This Polygon article on issues with the TARDIS for black fans of Doctor Who links to Put on a Bus when talking about Mickey Smith.
• The Website Nerdist posted an article with the title "Why Fanfiction Does Romance Better Than Hollywood", and it mentions and provides links to the tropes Meet Cute and Big Damn Kiss.
• Two opinion articles in The Daily Beast by Matt Lewis, anti-Trump conservative writer, link to TV Tropes articles.
  • "Trump’s Arizona Speech Proves His Shock Comic Act Has Jumped the Shark" links to Cousin Oliver and Jumping the Shark. In it, he talks about how Trump's brand of Shock Jock politics may be wearing out its welcome, and how he took on a fresh young face in Kari Lake^note , who would go on to lose her bid for Governor of Arizona in 2022, in an attempt to lend some rejuvenation to his flagging brand.
  • Near the end of "Nikki Haley Is Starting to Look Like a Real Threat to Trump", he discusses how the former US ambassador to the United Nations has an uphill undertaking to clear out the rest of the 2024 Republican presidental primary field, much less take on Trump himself, linking to Final Boss.^note However, even though she lasted longer than anyone else in a Trump-dominated primary field, she called off her campaign on March 4th, 2024.
• The Tumblr blog Text Post Tropes takes popular posts on the social media site and tropes them.

Tabletop Games

• Changeling: The Lost, in the sourcebook Swords at Dawn, details Talecrafting, a way Changelings can tweak fate to force life to follow story conventions, such as the Rule of Three, the Evil Stepmother, or the elderly mentor. Guess what site they reference as a good place to find inspiration?
• Fate Core system (link) has the following advice about the setting for a Fate game:
  If you're inventing a setting, you have more work cut out for you. It's beyond the scope of this chapter to tell you how to make a setting; we're assuming you already know how to do that if that's what you're choosing to do. (Besides, we live in a vast world of media. See tvtropes.org if you don't believe us.)

Video Games

• The indie game Bear and Breakfast drops this line in the trailer:
  "I'm too young to suffer a TV trope death!"
• Kingdom of Loathing has a monster in its 2010 Christmas content called the "Tome of Tropes."
  "You can't focus your attention on working, or on much of anything, so you turn to the nuclear solution of boredom: the Tome of Tropes. It's a giant book that explains and gives clever names to all of the recurring themes in literature, popular culture, and even real life. There are two things about the book that make it purest evil: the first is that anyone can add to it, so it's always changing and growing larger. The second is that every entry contains several references to other cleverly-named tropes, and touching one of those names sends you to an explanation of that trope's name, complete with references to other tropes... and at some point you look up and see you're eight years older than when you started."
• One of the Minecraft title blurbs reads: "Less addictive than TV Tropes!"
• In Terraria, the achievement for crafting the Zenith is called "Infinity +1 Sword"
• Two of Peacock's moves in Skullgirls are tropes documented on this wiki, and the move list says that their names actually are "Big Ball of Violence" and "Shadow of Impending Doom". Given the nature of the game, and especially the nature of Peacock, this really isn't surprising.
• In the English localization of Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, Monokuma and the Monokubs mention the "Death Is Cheap" trope by name after Monokuma comes Back from the Dead in the first chapter. They hate said trope, however.
• The Fabulous Fear Machine publisher, AMC Games, has tweeted that the game is the first of theirs to receive a TV Tropes game. They have even described the game as “taking over the world with TV Tropes”.

Web Animation

• An episode of an Extra Credits column focusing on the first five minutes of a game (and their importance), titled "Starting Off Right", shows the "Trauma-Induced Amnesia" TV Tropes article (that is, an excerpt of it) at around two minutes in.
• In the description of one of If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device shorts, Alfabusa notes "for the chroniclers over at TV Tropes" that the current episode is canon — the recap page of the series is keeping notes of which short is and isn't.
• During one of her superchat reading streams, Kiara Takahashi of hololive EN was pointed to her entry on the hololive characters pages, and proceeded to read several examples from it live with a mix of amusement and shock. She concluded by saying she would read more of the page later, off-stream.

Web Comics

• Every strip at The Best Gamepiece Photocomic links to a TV Tropes page with a relevant trope.
• As Dork Tower admits, TVTropes will indeed ruin your life.
• Errant Story: in one of the chapter commentaries, Bani calls Sara the Worf of Errant Story. Sara's response? "You're not allowed to read TVTropes anymore".
• Trope-tan and Captain Obvious are characters in The Way of the Metagamer. The comic also directly mentions Avatar and the Airbending Fellowship of Vampire Slayers and tropes on This Very Wiki.
• Irregular Webcomic! mentions this wiki in the notes a lot. So does Darths & Droids. As Dmmaus is a known Troper, this should be expected.
• This strip of Super Stupor.
• Stickman and Cube mentions us a few times. or at least refers to tropes by name.
• Nowhere University has references to this site.
• The commentary on this strip of Partially Clips.
• Phil Foglio has a link to us on the Girl Genius Fun Stuff page.
• xkcd once mentioned us here. And linked the comic to this site. Randall Munroe is a cruel man, as the people in this thread can certify.
• qxlkbh mentioned us in 42: regarding tvtropes and the title of 70: the one that has the title that says "hey tropers mark down theme naming in your trope bingo".
• The Rant for This Shortpacked! strip is "Is this something already covered by TV Tropes? I haven't checked yet". It is.
• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja recently had a strip that features a blurred website that looks veeeerryy suspicious.
• The Order of the Stick: According to the Giant, he's aware of TV Tropes, but has never directly referenced it; everything that seems like a reference is Older Than They Think.
• At least two of the authors of Exterminatus Now are tropers, and Silversword is one of them. Eastwood is the other.
• In at least one El Goonish Shive strip, Dan has linked to TV Tropes in The Rant. Specifically, the Red Shirt page.
• Andrew Hussie of Homestuck has mentioned us a few times. While he doesn't completely agree with our specific list-based methods, he seems to like the general troping idea and has said that he's found a few articles to be interesting reads. ^note Which is understandable, considering how many tropes are pulled off, lampshaded and zigzagged in Homestuck.
• Dinosaur Comics: The archive title of the Oct 28, 2009 page is "inspired by the tvtropes 'Weaksauce Weakness' page. tvtropes it great, it'll remind you of how ridiculous your body is, AND also suck up endless hours of your time".
• The Unspeakable Vault (of Doom) linked this site's "good summary" of Warhammer 40K in strip #341.
• Unwinder's Tall Comics: Barbecue Sauce has an anime to recommend.
• The chaps that create Virtual Shackles might well be tropers, as this comic references Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
• Ansem Retort has this as a sort of Take That! joke to the site. Duke then added in his update that people check out the site, as well as a disclaimer that he doesn't edit his own page and leaves it up to the fans.
• A Path to Greater Good: Guido (who does occasionally post on the TV Tropes forum) wonders if there's a trope for that hair. (Anime Hair or Improbable Hairstyle, by the way.)
• Bobwhite: This page discusses the Tzadikim Nistarim. The Alt Text notes "This one is on TV Tropes for some reason."
• The commentary to this Critical Miss strip (referencing Assassin's Creed):
  "The Templars are winning in the modern portion of the games because they finally have access to a certain website and thus can avoid embarrassing situations like the one illustrated in today's comic. That and they presumably outlawed hay."
  • When Erin went to visit her therapist in this strip he references several tropes to explain her mental problems. She accuses him of not being a real doctor and then the audience sees he has TVTropes open with "goatfuck crazy" in the search engine.
  "Alright, Miss Stout. From what you've told me you have a severe case of... hold on... Sanity Slippage, which is an ambiguous disorder caused by... huh... You're now what we technically call a 'cuckoolander'."
  • After Erin takes Kratos' (from God of War) advice and try to destroy her friend's Xbox 360 and almost seriously harming another in the process, she gets thrown out of their house. She then decides to get drunk, and comments that "This is going to look terrible on my TV Tropes page."
  • Johnathan Grey Carter, the writer of Critical Miss is pleased that it has a page:
  One of our readers, some might say our best reader, has started a Critical Miss TV Tropes page! I've always wanted my own TV Tropes page. So much so I even considered starting my own. But that'd be kind of like like signing your own yearbook, or masturbating in public. It's just not done. Whoever started the page may step forward and receive a moderate amount of praise and adulation.
• On the Ears for Elves links bar, our page is the first entry in "extras". We are also now the official character sheet, being the link under "about", though the original page (which our content is heavily based off) is still there if you know the URL. These links account for the main page having >800 inbounds and the character page having 150, despite the main page only having 50 wicks, as of the 3rd of June 2012.
• Times Like This: This strip goes out of its way to be Troperiffic with Dialogue Tropes before name dropping the "TV Tropes Foundation". Thomas Overbeck links to TV Tropes in the commentary:^note He had been linking to it in the top-right-hand corner of his site for the previous few months already.
  I'm really loving that site (and all the referral traffic it gets me).
• In one of the author's comments during the commentary rerun of Get Medieval Irony-chan said in regard to Bill & Ted appearing as knights in her story:
  Somewhere on the TV Tropes Wiki is a theory that Bill and Ted are Time Lords, but I'm not going to provide a link because that would involve entering the TV Tropes Wiki, and it might be months before I came out again.
• This strip from Skin Horse (currently used as a trope image for Description Cut).
• Colonel Glass in Spinnerette takes Genre Savvy to a whole new level simply by reading TV Tropes.
• In Full Frontal Nerdity, Frank finally found a way to make his plots less predictable when he GMs - a random plot element table cross-referenced with TV Tropes.
• The Extras Page for Bittersweet Candy Bowl has a link that leads to the TV Tropes page of it.
• The Toon Teens Comic has a character called Tropey The Talking Lampshade that supposedly runs its respective TV Tropes page in-universe.

Web Original

• This article on Snopes links to the Straw Feminist trope page in describing the sort of content of the tale that it is examining.
• Nice essay on The Millions examining whether or not we have a chilling effect on creativity. Also relays some information about China Miéville's opinion of the wiki.
• Wired:
  • Lore Sjöberg features us here. The page on the screen is Ridiculous Procrastinator.
  • The Angry Nerd, another feature of the site, has a video wherein he prepares for the apocalypse by printing out the site in its entirety.
• While Googling himself, Combo Panda comes across a TV Tropes article on Ryan ToysReview, the parent channel...
  Combo: TV Tropes- Even though we're on the Internet. Guess we're INTERNET TROPES!
  • and a special section about him. He proceeds to comment on some of the examples given to him and is impressed by how much TV Tropes documents him.
    Combo: These TV Tropes guys really watch like every episode of my show! That's awesome! TV Tropes is part of the Combo Crew! CONFIRMED!! They even put in our little dialogue we have.
• Fundies Say the Darndest Things: On the top of this page, it says "The "High Octane Nightmare Fuel" Award". Also, this quote got the "Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking" award.
• The SCP Foundation lists this site as an safe-class object: SCP 4445. (Granted, it's a joke entry, written in response to our article about them...) Seems that in the SCP-verse, this wiki is a front for the Foundation, used for psychological screening and recruitment. Also, in Supplemental Report 239-B-192. Not to mention members showing up on the forum occasionally.
• The Inglip's main (so to say) artist Prodlly (alias The Troll) evidently is deeply in love with TV Tropes, to the extent that he sometimes mentions it directly in the comics, for surplus metalulz.
• The Littlest Pet Shop (2012) fan site The Pet Shop Insider has a page about our page on the show.
• This Doctor Who TV article about the "Day of the Doctor" is very aware of TV Tropes; the entire article is about 80% WikiWord references. For example...
  Watch the special and tick off all the Continuity Nods you recognize because there will be tons of them! Expect dozens of Call Backs to previous stories also. Well…even more than usual. We already know that The Bus Came Back for Tennant and Piper and Moffat Dropped a Bridge on Paul McGann's Doctor in the prequel, so who else can we be expected to see."
• Ars Technica's 'Page Not Found' banner advises:
  If this is a really long outage, check out a cool site like reddit or TV Tropes to pass the time.
• Mr. Mendo reviewed The Room (2003) on this site's request, and referred to the Booth's occassionally rocky website relationship with Tropers. Still, he calls TV Tropes his favorite website.
  "Even if you are going to Hell..."
• Indirect example: In March 2014, AV Club published an article co-written by several staff members titled "What TV Trope Aggravates You the Most?" Although the article never directly references this site or its trope names, the title is a dead giveaway. For the curious, the tropes listed are: In Medias Res, Christmas Miracle (more or less), Fake Band, Enhance Button, Will They or Won't They?, Convenient Miscarriage, Disney Death, Anti-Hero (overused), Bikini Bar (now merged with Family-Friendly Stripper, also overused), Disposable Woman and Old Friend (you guessed it—overused).
  • TV Tropes is mentioned on the 'Fun!' page on AmazIn.com: https://amazinhub.wordpress.com/
• In preparation for the release of Kirby: Triple Deluxe, Gamespot wrote a news article answering why Kirby is always angry in American box art, referencing American Kirby Is Hardcore in the process.
• Rob Bricken's unfavorable review of Hercules (2014) claims that the film "refuses to show anything that doesn't have a 3000-word TV Tropes page devoted to it". He proves his point by linking to the Training the Peaceful Villagers entry ("we begin with Herc training a misfit army of villagers into an elite fighting force as seen in countless films"), then listing the plot's numerous other cliches.
• In his review of The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show, Ed Liu notes that Pebbles is "the one most often saddled with the Idiot Ball, since most of the episodes rely on her misunderstanding something and then finding the worst possible way to fix her mistakes", complete with a link to the trope.
• There's another animation review that links to Idiot Ball: this piece on the Chinese film Legend of a Rabbit.
• This article at We Hunted the Mammoth, a site that ridicules "the new misogyny" of anti-feminism, uses a link to the You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry! page to make fun of the post it's discussing.
• Another indirect example: Pop culture analysis site The Mary Sue^note It's already named after a trope, albeit one that predates this wiki published an article titled "What We Can Actually Learn by Re-Imagining the 'Manic Pixie Dream Girl' Trope". It doesn't mention this page, although it gives due credit to Nathan Rabin for naming the concept.
• Cracked links to Brother Chuck (since renamed Chuck Cunningham Syndrome) in The 5 Most Maddeningly Unresolved TV Plotlines under "#3. Mr. Turner Eats Pavement on Boy Meets World, since Mr. Turner crashes his motorcycle offscreen and proceeds to never appear again.
  In most cases we'd accept this turn of events, as characters on sitcoms vanish all the freaking time.
• After Ellen, a site that critiques pop culture from a lesbian perspective, links to Bury Your Gays in this article about professional creators and fanfic writers who defy the trope.
• Feminist site theestablishment.co has an article criticizing Dave Chappelle for the "homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic rants" in his 2017 Netflix specials. When the article discusses Chappelle's routine about "an ugly superhero who rapes women to activate his superpowers and save lives", it links to Politically Incorrect Hero (under its alternate name Licensed Sexist).
• The website Atomic Rockets, which discusses many science-fiction space tropes, has linked to TV Tropes several times and even quotes our trope definitions on some pages.
• Wonkette.com is a site that covers American politics from a satirical perspective. One of its articles has a reference:
  But surely there are more important divisions in this divided, fractured nation? Not to be all Andy Borowitz about it (and to be all Andy Borowitz about it), there are families who put the toilet paper over the top of the roll, and families who do it wrong; families who leave the television blaring away all day whether anyone's around to watch it, and families who will never stop telling you they don't own a TV because it's all garbage; and families who observe the Rule of Three, and families who swear eternal vendetta on anyone who links to TV Tropes.
  • Wonkette references us again in this article on Kentucky senator Rand Paul, which says that "Paul took the Senate floor Monday afternoon to give his own "Reason You Suck" Speech", including a link to the trope.
• Bomb Report is a website that catalogs, as the title implies, Box Office Bombs. In the header for the Blade Runner 2049 write-up, the term "Acclaimed Flop" is used.
• The 2019 Game Developer's Conference presentation "You Can Take an Arrow to the Knee and Still Be an Adventurer" by Cherry Thompson cites TV Tropes as a good resource for understanding the usual stereotypes to avoid when featuring disabled characters.
• One Annie Chester wrote for expatalachians.com, taking offense at how the Kansai accent tends to be dubbed into a Deep South/Brooklyn accent, writing that "by rendering Osakan accents as redneck or Brooklyn accents, problematic and damaging stereotypes are conveyed across linguistic barriers" because of it. She references The Idiot from Osaka and the now-disambiguated Kansai Regional Accent.

Web Videos

• Moviebob: In this article, he lovingly kicks our asses. The good stuff kicks in on page 2.
• Atop the Fourth Wall: Linkara made the exclamation "Oh my God! TV Tropes used one of my quotes!" during a Previously on… montage.^note According to Linkara it was the headline quote for Broken Aesop
  "...Spend HOURS at the TV Tropes Booth!"^note Part 2, to be specific.
• Brows Held High: Oancitizen has mentioned in his Ken Park commentary that he used us as a reference when looking up films to review, specifically the pages Le Film Artistique, True Art Is Incomprehensible and Euroshlock.
• Game Grumps: During their playthrough of Donkey Kong Country, Arin discusses on how he visited TV Tropes and read on his character page how he was described as Book Dumb for dropping out of high school.
• The Mysterious Mr. Enter regularly references TV Tropes in his videos, linked his tropes page to his channel, and even edited it a bit.
  • He even showed the Status Quo Is God page briefly in the episode regarding "Seahorse Seashell Party".
  • He acknowledges a period during mid-late 2015 as an Audience-Alienating Era in "Top 10 Worst Mr. Enter Videos", even screenshotting the example from YMMV.The Mysterious Mr Enter, though for some reason he refers to it by its old name, Dork Age.
• CR of Familiar Faces mentions a character as The Woobie in his Top 10 Overlooked Christmas Specials, even mentioning us by name.
• The Nostalgia Chick:
  • Dedicated a whole video to Distaff Counterpart and The Smurfette Principle, using TV Tropes' names for both.
  • She strikes again in her review of Ever After, where she discusses The Woobie trope and mentions TV Tropes by name.
• Y: Ruler of Time of Read Right To Left, the Manga review show on Channel Awesome:
  • Uses a lot of trope names in his review of School Rumble, and displays the Tsundere page image as well.
  • In his later review of Let's Bible, he refers to TV Tropes by name, discussing the What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic? trope, and even displaying the page as he talks. In subtitles, he admits that he visits the site, and also says that the above paragraph shouldn't count as an example of Notable References to TVTropes, but that his present discussion should. The obvious solution? Have both of them as examples, of course.
• Dena, of Channel Awesome's Game Den and Film Den shows referenced a character as The Woobie complete with an image of the page.
• The Blog The Slacktivist made one of its Left Behind criticisms here, with a reference to Mr. Exposition. This comment states:
  We all knew this day would come. Fred himself has opened the door to the TV Tropes Abyss.
  [clears schedule for rest of day]
• SF Debris has made a couple references in his videos, including a notice to alert the users of TV Tropes that he finally gave a Star Trek: Voyager episode a score of 10.
• ProtonJon is fully aware of TV Tropes and occasionally namedrops tropes.
  The Superman LP has led to edits on the TVTropes entry for Superman 64. My work here is done. And in The Runaway Guys Let's Play on Mario Party, he says "TV Tropes just kinda had a heart attack."
• Chuggaaconroy also wound up outing himself as a troper^note Not to be confused with a trooper. EVER. on the Runaway Guys, mainly with his repeated usage of saying "Press A to not die" (and on the guys' Super Smash Bros. Brawl LP, "Press Start to not die").
  • Made more obvious in Episode 16 of the Runaway Guys' New Super Mario Bros. Wii LP, where he comments, "Josh, according to TV Tropes, you're the girl."
  • In Ōkamiden, he even mentions reading his own pages and having major respect for the people who edit them so fast.
    Chugga: I don't know who runs my TV Tropes page, but I gotta say this: I have undying respect for whoever you person or persons are because you keep that thing updated like nuts. Especially the Funny page. My god, it's nuts.
  • In Part 17 of TRG's Sonic Adventure playthrough, he mentions being the page quote for Cave Behind the Falls.
  • As of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Chugga is prone to mention many tropes by name that likely are only known by tropers who visit this website often, implying that Emile may have spent much more time on This Very Wiki than he lets on.
• Lewis Brindley and Simon Lane referenced the site in the Yogscast Minecraft Series when they note when a safe path leads to nowhere but a dangerous path leads further.
• Bad Movie Beatdown: In Film Brain's review of Far Cry, he mentioned this site as he stated that he was a Slave to PR.
• Laci Green has a link to her entry on her site.
• Anita Sarkeesian from Feminist Frequency did a six part series on tropes vs women, using this site as an inspiration. TV Tropes even gets referenced in one of the videos.
• According to his Show and Trailer for Comic-Con 2012, Fraser of Video Games Awesome! reads TV Tropes, and he mentions how it sucks away hours of his time away, especially the article for his own show.
• The Lets Player raocow uses Idiosyncratic Episode Naming for his LPs so often that he has his own page for it. In his runthrough of the Super Mario Bros. X game The Invasion 2, his videos were all titled after tropes that he felt related to something that occurred within the video. The ninth video was even entitled 'Idiosyncratic Episode Naming'
• The Cartoon Hero frequently references tropes in his videos and even mentions his page on this site.
• In The Angry Video Game Nerd's review of Ghosts 'n Goblins, he attacks the cartridge with a Cluster F-Bomb, a Precision F-Strike and an Atomic F-Bomb. They're referred to with their actual trope names, and they're also listed in a Final Fantasy-esque menu as such.
• For The Nostalgia Critic's editorial episode looking into the popularity of Tom Hiddleston's Loki, he namedropped The Woobie and examined it. He also remarked about his own appearance in the page in the process^note although really the Critic appears in Jerkass Woobie.
• Two Best Friends Play:
  • During their Saturday Morning Scrublords of Bio F.R.E.A.K.S., the whole crew get's into a heated argument on... the origins of the Underboobs. Woolie takes it to Google:
    Woolie: Giant Bomb doesn't haves anything on underboob, but TV Tropes has a page on it.
    [Beat]
    Pat: Well, Woolie is dead.
  • During Woolie and Matt's playthrough of Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE they both get into a discussion about the Fiery Redhead trope but it starts with Woolie wondering if there are subversions of this trope (characters that have red hair but instead of having a fiery peronality it's a cold personality instead), and then casually states that TV Tropes probably has an article about that.
• In Episode 30 of Dr. Crafty, Crafty mentions researching about Fate/stay night by reading the TV Tropes page. He subsequently enticed the viewers to visit his own article on the site.
• In the entry for Slaughter High on WatchMojo's "Top 10 Movies with a 0 Percent Rating on Rotten Tomatoes That You Should See Anyway", the voiceover briefly mentions how it can be a visual aid for this site's Slasher page.
• Patrick (H) Willems mentions our page about Plot Holes in his video essay about why plotholes don't matter.
• invoked In The Editing Room's script for Tulip Fever, Holliday Grainger claims that Alicia Vikander's Zany Scheme to fool her husband by pretending to be pregnant while Holliday actually has the baby is "the dumbest fucking plan ever. EVER. It's the new codifier for 'Idiot Plot' on TV Tropes."
• Stuart Ashen makes a Tv Tropes checklist in his 2010 Christmas Special Compilation. He finishes by literally poking a poodle.
• On Unraveled, Brian discusses the purpose of art in his call for updating Fallout's music:
  We need art because of its fundamental importance to human expression. Songs were made long before written language to help keep stories alive, and they'd be added to and embellished, much like the cultural touchstone of our time, TVTropes.org.
• In a video for Polygon, Brian David Gilbert mentionsinvoked Fridge Logic which became Fridge Horror (the latter of which he describes as the Pokémon fandom's favourite pasttime) in regards to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 having a punji pit. No mention of TV Tropes itself, but certainly a clear reference to two notable pages.
• In the Jacksfilms YIAY episode "Why "Yo Daddy" jokes don't work", Jack puts up a screenshot of the Disappeared Dad trope page when discussing an answer that didn't fit that trope for a change.
• For his Milestone Celebration "Top Ten Projects I'm Most Proud Of", The Quarter Guy acknowledges that he has a page on this site while also referencing a Growing the Beard entry for his page.
• When Ironmouse saw a clip of Kiara reacting to the HoloMyth page, more specifically the note attached which mentions the existence of her character page, her curiosity was piqued and she went to see it for herself. Mouse's reaction ranges from acknowledging the accuracy, laughing or freaking out at some absurd tropes, refusing to read a few of the entries, to expressing comedic outrage towards certain tropes that rub her the wrong way.
  Ironmouse: Too Kinky to Torture? What the fuck?!
• Johnny Chiodini, Dungeon Master for Oxventure is at the least aware of the page for the show. After the boss of "Dine Harder" ended up being crushed in a lift accident, they outright told fans to add said (non-)encounter to the list of times on there that the Guild had derailed the game.

Wikis

• Wikipedia: has an article.
  • Their pages on Evil laughter, Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Flanderization and more, reference our own pages on them. The latter one even points out that TV Tropes coined the term Flanderization!
• Know Your Meme has an article on TV Tropes.
• Rational Wiki lists TV Tropes under "Internet Kooks"^note specifically under "sometimes good, sometimes shit".
• TV Tropes entry on the wiki index.
• Chewiki, the official wiki of YouTube Poop (yeah, really), has an informative page on TV Tropes as well.
• Occasionally D&D Wiki links to this site.
• The Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe, a server-specific City of Heroes / City of Villains role-playing resource infrequently links to TV Tropes in their articles, primarily by way of its users lampshading the tropes that their characters invoke or conform to.
• According to the SCP Foundation, we are an SCP Object (Safe class) numbered SCP-4445-J. Apparently, we're a front for the Foundation and a recruitment tool.
• The AH.com Wiki (wiki of the site which brought you Look to the West, Decades of Darkness, the Chaos Timeline and others).
• GargWiki, concerning Gargoyles, recognizes that one of the series' characters is the Trope Namer for a couple of tropes.
• Uncyclopedia takes an affectionate nip at our heels here. Featured article as of July 30th, 2010.
• Oh, Internet has a few kind words for us.
• The Discworld And Terry Pratchett Wiki mentions tvtropes several times, generally in acknowledgement that an idea or concept about the Discworld was expressed here first, and is not original to the DWTP wiki. Criticisms made of the Wiki on tvtropes are also acknowledged and discussed, and links to this site are freely given.
• The Touhou Wiki, although it doesn't have an actual entry for TV Tropes, as would be expected from a wiki on Touhou Project, but it does include a link to our Touhou character page from the character index on TW.
• DC Database frequently makes external links to TV Tropes as another site for comics appreciation.
• Asperchu's main page links to its TV Tropes page.
• The Arcana Wiki tries to mirror and partially rewrite TV Tropes for role-playing game purposes - instead of listing examples, it strives to provide inspiration and ideas.
• TFWiki.net proudly proclaims its status as the Trope Namer for Ruined FOREVER. Their article on The Bumblebee (renamed to Kid-Appeal Character, although the redirect remains) makes a similar reference, what with all three of the Trope Namers being on the list.
• Bulbapedia, a Pokémon wiki, has linked to Comic-Book Time in their "Aging in the anime" article for ages, mentions Ambiguously Brown in the articles about the series's Unfortunate Implications, and linked to Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action back when they had an entire article about the topic.
• Star Army has an article for TVtropes; additionally, their ISC Phoenix plot has a Tropes page dedicated to the TV Tropes found within it. The webmaster has even set up a special interwiki syntax to make linking to tvtropes easier.
• The Drawn Together wiki links to that show's TV Tropes page on the main series article, and in a section discussing the show's content, links to the Negative Continuity article.
• The Heroes Wiki has several pages and categories named after hero and goodness related Tropes from here, notably the terms "Big Good" and "Five-Man Band".
• The Golden Sun wiki's article on the character Sheba links to Lolicon when describing the shipping of Sheba with the four-years-older Felix.
  • There's also the shipping page which links to our references to the Golden Sun shipping fandom (which also helps explain the phenomenon).
• Everything2 has a node.
• The Kingdom of Loathing Wiki has a page about an enemy in the game called the Tome of Tropes, which is a giant book that explains and gives names to all of the recurring themes in media and real life. Although taking a look in the tome is a good thing to do in times of boredom, you might spend too much time reading it, which is harmful to your health and salary.
• The Puella Magi Wiki's page on Gertrud has a link to the page Nightmare Fuel. For good reason. (Yeah, you probably don't want to click that link.)
  • Their yuri undertones page links to Puella Magi Madoka Magica's Ho Yay page...which links back to their page, forming an infinite loop.
• The Villains Wiki has several pages and categories named after villain and evil related Tropes from here, notably the term "Complete Monster".
• UFOpaedia makes a mention of the TV Tropes page for game series it covers, specifically pointing out a since-corrected error on the page.
• The Mass Effect Wiki uses TV Tropes as a reference in demonstrating that the name Leeroy Jenkins is a reoccurring character name.
• The Call of Duty Wiki's page detailing every instance of Plot Armor in the series includes a link to the TV Tropes page about the same phenomenon.
• BlazBlue's wiki references Yuuki Terumi's status as this site's God of Trolling.
• SJWiki describes as obsessive fans with a sexist and toxic environment.
• Conservapedia has a page on TV Tropes, complaining about its creator Andrew Schafly being mocked, "bloat" stemming from the tropers being "obsessed with television shows, such as the vacuous occult teen drama Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "a non fiction educational wiki [being] shoe-horned into TV Tropes as a way for the liberal editors to criticize it" (possibly referring to our work page on Conservapedia, long since deleted).
• 1d4chan (an unnofficial wiki for 4chan's /tg/ board) has an article discussing TV Tropes. In spite of their criticism of us, they begrudgingly admit that there is an overlap in userbase.
• The Magic: The Gathering Wiki occasionally references TV Tropes when discussing card trivia or references. Their page for trivia about Shadows Over Innistrad links to It's Probably Nothing.
• On their page for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, WiKirby links to our page on the same game.
• Pure Good Wiki links to This Very Wiki's Heroes' Frontier Step page on the former wiki's equivalent called "Goodness Zone".

---