Uh, a trope is just a term for certain storytelling conventions, which covers pretty much anything that could appear in a story because tropes literally exist to point out certain trends in stories. You seem to believe we think stories exist to explain tropes, rather than vice versa.
If you have an example of a story that doesn't have a single storytelling device or convention, then I'd be ecstatic to hear it.
Edited by mightymewtron I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.
I'm not sure why you would write something, when you are convinced it will be removed. It may, depending on your responses further. It's certainly a rude discussion starter.
... do... do you think that this site created the term "trope"?
Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.
This site did used to have "everything is a trope" mentality but it seems to be slowly losing that. Many pages have been acknowledged as not being tropeworthy and have been cut.
Check out my forum game: Rate the above YMMV.
Local Egregious Plant
Got a question: should I add in a Laconic page, or would that mess things up?
Troper Wall, sandbox, and I'm trying to kill typos.
They think me mad
Is this page actually attempting to make any sort of point? "Tropes are not bad" with the definition of tropes tvtropes uses is like saying "having words in your story isn't bad."
To the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Hide / Show Replies
the problem here is that the only way the word "trope" is used away from this site and its culture is as a synonym of "figure of speech" or as a synonym of "cliché." that's it. full stop. and writing a lengthy, snarky article declaring otherwise does nothing at all to change this fact. and it is a fact. dictionaries print how a word is used and this word is just not reported as being used in this way in ANY major mainstream English dictionary on the planet. and there are more than the big two, but those oft mentioned two don't do it, either.
words matter. shared understanding of meaning is really important. no meaningful communication is possible without it. by insisting on this particular word's idiosyncratic interpretation—an interpretation whose origin is known only to its creators without a single citation to be found—this site in no way serves that shared understanding, preferring instead to flippantly make declarations based on faulty understanding itself—or maybe, as seems just as likely, it's yet another example of the arrogance of internet anonymity inspiring easily countervailed grand statements of post-adolescent sophistry.
what this site has done is conflate "figure of speech" with "element of storytelling." not the same thing at all. labeling something a "trope" here means calling something an "element of storytelling" and this is simply false. this is simply not common parlance in any way. this site's culture is in no way shifting the meaning such that at some future date it becomes the norm and lands in a serious dictionary.
this all simply means that tropes are bad and will always be bad and are never a good idea to deploy and never improve a work and always push a reader out of a work and invariably ruin a good time for anyone of any sophistication with whatever art is being experienced.
and, yes, obviously, by the dictionary definition, anyone anywhere at anytime may produce a "tropeless tale" free of cliches and free of figures of speech and even free of metaphoric language, for that matter.
there is nothing new under the sun? children, there is ONLY new under the sun, across from the sun, around the sun ... notions once impossible until NEW notions arrived as they always do as we always learn.
that fatuous quote from that fatuous source is the last refuge of the untalented. "It's tried and true!" is that contingent's rallying cry.
the rest of us hear that cry ... and groan in wretched anticipation.
Edited by IMIQ200
You sound like Chris Chan, and this is not even sarcasm
I love how you ignored that there is entire page dedicated to the fact that tropes are not bad, but anyways, since you are so confident on your power ...
Create a Tropeless Tale. No, really. Try to do it. Just remember that a book literally dedicated to a bunch of numbers has more than 10 tropes.
Doing a completely tropeless tale is impossible, but what about a tale without any intentional tropes, and only Omnipresent Tropes ? I think it could be possible to do an Almost-Tropeless-Tale by using only "self-evident" tropes, those that are inherently part of normal storytelling and that you find in practically any story that's not a willing Deconstruction, but avoiding using any more complicated tropes.
Of course, you could decide that "Tropeless" is a trope in itself, but we're falling into paradox territory so for the sake of simplicity let's ignore this part.
Edited by ScroogeMacDuck Hide / Show Replies
I believe that tropes only exist because we define them as such.
From the point of view of a dog - or, to be really thorough, a bacterium - there are no tropes because they cannot perceive them.
Basically, you write write a story with no "intentional" tropes and tropers will still add tropes because they see them in your story.
The only way I think one can go about it, as I've suggested above, is to write something without an audience. And that's only if one considers the author to not be an audience in themselves.
I believe Wittgenstein said that a language game can only exist if there is more than one person to participate in it.
If I were to apply this to tropes, if I wrote something it would only have tropes if I had an audience. Can only an audience ascribe tropes to a work?
If I had no audience, would it even make sense to call what I've written a work?
Sanity is overrated
Nope! Sorry, but:
- Alliterative Title
- Blank Book
- Metafictional Title
- Spoiler Title and Exactly What It Says on the Tin (invoked but missed)
- The End
- The The Title
- Terminology Title
And also, since it is not tropeless:
PS: Don't try to work your way around all that by removing the title, because No Title is a trope.
Edited by ScroogeMacDuck
Lol sure, I didn't have the guts in fear of spamming. Go ahead xD
#nolivesmatter
That's terrifying.
This abomination is mean-spirited, unnecessary, and just flat-out wrong. Nearly all of these "tropes" are prime examples of People Sit On Chairs. Last I checked "Plot" was not a trope by any definition, let alone our *ahem* loose definition thereof. Tropes Are Not Bad, but Tropes Are Not Good either. I cite the final rule on Welcome To TV Tropes: "...and general asshattery of any kind."
e: forgot a quotation mark :P
Edited by setnakhte "Roll for whores." Hide / Show Replies
That post is 2 years old...
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
This isn't really a trope anyway...I think something has to be used several times to qualify... Though I do believe I have an example: "Once upon a time, there was a magical place where it never rained. The end" (Holes)
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I don't know if we should be having examples considering that having examples that are played straight is literally impossible. However i will keep this here just in case.
- Koyaanisqatsi can certainly feel like this. The movie, and it's sequels Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi, have no obvious plot, story, actors, or dialog. It's just time lapse footage of nature, people, or machines with music composed by Philip Glass. While it does have Crowning Music Of Awesome, and the people do give the occasional Death Glare, it does not use tropes as tools, and can easily be called The Tropeless Tale.
- Ditto for My Dinner with Andre. Roger Ebert even prefaced his entry on the film in his Great Movies books with the claim, saying that it was the only movie he could think of off the top of his head with no cliches of any kind whatsoever. You'll find the approach itself is one of Minimalism and there's something in the way of Bookends, but there's no real plot to speak of, no consistent or central conflict (and all conflict that does exist is either internal in a purely inferred way or takes the form of argument), and it's very hard to even describe what kind of movie it is in the first place.
- Many incomprehensible films either have few tropes, or tropes that are difficult to place. This includes works from David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, Lars Von Trier and many more.
Well, Koyaanisqatsi has tropes listed, and the word incomprehensible is linked to a trope, so I'd say you did good.
Actually a girl.
We don't have it yet but I found this awesomely incomprehensable film called Decasia, i have not been able to find more then 3 tropes so far!
It is impossible to write a trope less tale because Tropes do not come wholly from the author, many are cast upon the work by the audience recognizing a pattern.
- 5 and #6 are innacurate. Just because a work is a televison show/book/movie/whatever, doesn't mean it's a trope. TV Tropes has pages FOR movies, movies themselves are not tropes. Neither are plots by themselves, characters by themselves, or settings by themselves.
this is the single most condescending ass page on the entire website. ok, maybe not the most, but up there.
it's fallacious reasoning to say that you can't make a story without tropes because everything is a trope. I can just as easily say that it's impossible to make a story without Smeernop - a word that I just made up, but is defined as "anything which occurs in a story ever" or something equally nebulous.
The term trope itself is just a word devised by fans to categorize things that occur in media, ergo literally anything in media can just have the "trope" label slapped on it by virtue of existing in media. It's just one big pile of circular logic.
It doesn't exist in reality. Authors do not think of tropes when writing (when they do it usually makes for shit stories, and for good reason), they just have ideas, some of which are intentionally or unintentionally based on something else.
I can hardly imagine the sheer audacity someone must've had to make a giant ass page essentially arguing in the smuggest way possible that a work can't have tropes because we explicitly engineered the definition of a trope so that no media ever could not contain them, including a horrendously unfunny section where the almighty waifu-goddess Trope-tan enlightens the uneducated rube reading this article and lets them see The Truth™ that tropes are all consuming despite being an ephemeral fanspeak term that only exists on the internet and in the minds of people who spend far too much time on this site (heck I spend too much time on this site and even I'm not that deluded). And then they include a list of "tropes" that is just restating the point in ever more condescending terms.
I've always despised the "Just For Fun" articles because every single one I've seen has just been an excuse to passive-aggressively complain about petty things or act smug under the guise of "humor", despite them being as funny as a heart attack*, but this one takes the cake. This was a collaborative effort, the closest thing TV Tropes has had to a complete mainpage circlejerk. And I'm probably going to get lambasted in the replies for daring to break it, because something being a Just For Fun article means you literally cannot complain about it ever.
Assuming my comment doesn't just get removed anyway.
- the exception to this is when they trope a show within a show. those are great.
Edited by Gotgunpowder Suspended for literally no reason lol Hide / Show Replies