Help with finding appropriate character tropes

One way I like to develop my OCs is to create what the TV Tropes character sheet for their setting would look like if I ran TV Tropes, but I'm not very trope-savvy, so I'm not really sure of what tropes exist that would apply to them. One day, I discovered the character sheets for Degrassi: The Next Generation, and thought that I could mine them for tropes to flesh out my OCs for a modern high-school setting. However, partway through the first one, I was repulsed by the sheer grimdark, to the point of being glad that I never watched the show. That being said, I do like the idea of mining a character sheet for a similar work to flesh out my OCs, but Degrassi just might not be the right source for that, probably because it’s more of a straight-up drama and my OCs tend to be more dramedic. Do you have any recommendations for works that I could mine for this purpose? Thanks in advance.

Edited by Kahran042 on Feb 29th 2024 at 11:10:35 AM

If you want inspiration for building up characters, I would advise that you just... watch this stuff instead of skimming trope pages, because that's never going to give you the whole picture. Consume media in its intended context—tropes as this site presents them are and should be descriptive, applied after-the-fact.

You're writing by checking off boxes and that's 100% going to come through.

Edited by Chortleous on Feb 29th 2024 at 10:16:24 AM

Thanks for the tip.

One way that I've used tropes during the writing process is by looking for tropes similar to something I want to do, and then skimming those tropes' examples to get a cross-section of how it tends to be used, so that I can make mine different. That requires you to already know what you want to do, though, and I find that the best way to get there is to just write your characters in an actual story. There is a ton that goes into creating a functional character, plot, setting, story, everything that just isn't tropeable.