YMMV / TV Tropes

• Archive Panic: If you're new to TV Tropes, brew some coffee.
• Awesomeness Withdrawal: Let's just face it. After reading most of the articles we have to offer, you can be quite depressed now that you'll have to wait for pages for works and tropes to be produced at normal intervals. Sometimes there may be cases of rereading the same tropes repeatedly.
• Broken Base:
  • The act of locking pages. Those for it point out that the pages that do end up getting locked are usually prime targets for trouble, arguing and that locking them forcefully puts an end to any fighting and vandalism. Those against it feel that everyone ends up being punished for the actions of a few people and feel that the people who vandalize pages should be banned/suspended instead of cutting off the page from everyone. They also point out that Locked Pages tend to become outdated with time since only moderators can edit them, something best seen in pages that have been locked for years and consequentially have many redlinks and/or outdated entries attributed to them.
  • The gradual tightening of the rules from 2017 onward. There are many who see this as justified since TV Tropes has rapidly gained attention since then, necessitating tighter quality control over what is and isn't allowed. Others, mostly consisting of users who were around on or before 2017, dislike how the stricter guidelines have since limited what can and can't be done on the site, mostly concerning the usage of YMMV Tropes, to the point where some users chose to quit the site.
• Fun for Some: Anecdotally, some people actually enjoy categorizing media elements and their examples. (Who knew?) Some also enjoy the opportunity to familiarize themselves with works that they may not be able or willing to experience directly, or discover new and unexpected insights about works they have experienced.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: This site has a lot of users from the United Kingdom and Malaysia. It's not uncommon to see "rubbish" or an obscure British pop culture reference on a page, or for a trope page regarding censorship to describe Malaysia's conservative policies & laws.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: On the Pothole Magnet page, the entry for Memetic Mutation says there are over 9000 instances of potholing to that page. There used to be a note saying "There aren't actually that many." Fast forward, and now there actually are that many. Thus, the note now confirms that it's Not Hyperbole.
• Memetic Mutation: It is not uncommon to see "TV Tropes brought me here." on a comments section when this site does indeed link to whatever said site is. There are also enough in-jokes for a separate page.
• More Popular Spin Off: This wiki spun off from a forum thread on Buffistas.org. While you are obviously more likely to be familiar with TV Tropes than Buffistas (you're reading this page after all), the same is true for internet users in general.
• Older Than They Think: We're not actually the first people to gather up all the Tropes imaginable. Our list of Books on Trope shows various precursors going back to Poetics.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Even this very wiki has had many current and former users complain about the changes made over the years, such as the removal of the "Wall Bangers" tab and the Troper Tales feature, the gradual addition of many tropes to the In-Universe Examples Only, No Recent Examples, Please!, and Flame Bait sections, and the stricter enforcement of the rules and the Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment since 2017.
  • The decision to ban Natter and Word Cruft led to complaints from users upset that they couldn't complain or snark anymore, or that the terms used utilized obscure words nobody knows.
  • The layout update on June 26, 2018 received a lot of flak. Some users didn't like the updated theme due to changes to how pictures, bullets, notes, etc. looked, and to make matters worse, the site was buggy upon release and had issues with account security.^note Users were randomly logged in as other users and were able to see their email address and their watchlist The developers immediately took feedback from the community and worked to fix most of the bugs.
  • Whenever a trope gets a name change, it can garner this reaction from the people who either liked the old name or the people who will have to change the old name on every page it was on to the new name, which can be in the thousands depending on how popular it was.
  • There are people who fight against it when a trope falls under No Real Life Examples, Please!, such as smuggling real life examples under folders like "Other", to the point where subpages abused and made for real life examples were sent to the Permanent Red Link Club.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Given its reliance on informal writing style and pop culture references, it can be made very apparent when a certain entry or article was made (even when there are efforts to minimize such datings), for example something written in the mid-to-late 2000's containing plenty of references to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Haruhi Suzumiya or Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.
  • This can also happen on pages for finished works that describe the events and characters in ways that implies the series is still ongoing (e.g. using present-tense grammar or phrases like “seems like they’re becoming” or “will likely be”). Thus dating it to whenever the series was still ongoing.
  • Due to changes in wiki editing guidelines over the years, it's not unheard of for older pages to feature deprecated stylistic elements, particularly with how examples are written, especially if such pages have not attracted an Entry Pimp or Wiki Curator, or have few wicks.
  • Trope Namers can sometimes show signs of this, especially if a memetic work has multiple tropes named after it. Egregious examples include the five tropes named after Zero Wing^note War Was Beginning, Somebody Set Up Us the Bomb, All Your Base Are Belong to Us, You Have No Chance to Survive and For Great Justice and the three tropes and an index named after Sony's E3 2006 presentation^note Attack Its Weak Point, This Index Hits for Massive Damage, Giant Enemy Crab, and Real-Time Weapon Change.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Despite some of the pages being about family-friendly media, they'll make references to adult franchises, and having Drinking Game pages for even the friendliest shows out there. This indicates the website isn't primarily child-safe or appropriate. Plus, works being family-friendly, or tropes being innocent won't stop some tropers from putting in an occasional profanity.

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