Perceptions of TV Tropes outside of TV Tropes?

(Not a complaint thread.)

In recent times, I’ve noticed changing attitudes towards the website itself and its users. TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life still persists of course, but there’s been a higher amount of scrutiny and mockery pertaining as to how the website presents tropes and media criticism. It’s usually mentioned alongside CinemaSins (which people are already extremely polarised on). In short, TV Tropes seems to be developing a Hatedom. While I’m aware that it’s always existed ever since that series on Troper Tales (which is already long defunct), I don’t really know where this hate came from?

yes we do have a hatedom,all sites do,it's a natural occurrence,we can listen to the reasonable critis and try to change for the better but very often the loud unhelpful voices make that difficult

Warning: Opinions below.

It comes in part from a disconnect between the intent of the site (cataloguing storytelling devices) and the way some users have interacted with that (using it as a writing template or guide.)

Another component to it is the fact that the site has an aggressively white male nerd slant, and that has resulted in some deeply problematic naming conventions, some of which persist (Ethical Slut comes to mind), others of which have gone the way of the dodo.

That association with white male nerddom has also been a source of poor regard after the broader cultural conversation about the toxic, sexist and generally shitty dimensions of that demographic.

Well, I just found this.

Edited by RabidTanker on Oct 6th 2018 at 4:23:47 AM

Both that subreddit and it's tumblr variant are alt-right echo chambers. There's nothing to be gained by listening to the hate they spew.

Is it wrong that I kind of agree with that thread?

By the way, what's alt-right?

Edited by RabidTanker on Oct 6th 2018 at 4:35:09 AM

> alt-right?

Alternate right,ie. the very right wing online

That isn't exactly helpful...

Trump supporters, i.e. racism, sexism, homophobia, just everything awful about that walk of life.

That is incorrect.

Right now there is no true Alt-Right definition, it's mostly an umbrella term for the growing neo-Nazi, neo-Confederates, white-supremacy and other extreme right-wing fringe groups.

@math729d That's a fair opinion. TV Tropes definitely shouldn't be used as guidelines for inexperienced writers since those tend to turn out poorly. And I do agree with the website's age making it not as socially progressive as it could have been. IMO the site's user base has probably grown more diverse ever since the last poll, despite this.

I still don't understand why media critics mock TV Tropes so much though. While I agree that it doesn't go into much detail about examining and criticising tropes (which isn't part of its policy anyway), it's still a bit disconcerting when they say it has little to no value at all. They rarely explain why they take this stance, so can anybody help me out with this?

I think it's because one of our slogans bills us as an guide to writing and I haven't seen an formal guide to writing an story on here; but then again, this is why public schools exist. And they also think putting random stuff together will make an award-winning story (it obviously doesn't, but it won't stop people from trying).

You might be right but TV Tropes does help some writers be aware of certain trends and ideas that appear in fiction even if we are informal and more of a wiki. TV Tropes is a good place to start especially when you are not very aware of how certain tropes, ideas and cliches work. It also a good place to learn why those tropes exist and how they evolved in certain media.

There are also many people who come here just for fun or sometimes to get lost in an endless cascade of trope page discoveries.

About the other thing, the on-topic conversations does have a very left-wing bias, but that's what you get when most of the people who come here are young and diverse pop culture fans, plus the fact that moderation doesn't allow blatant racism/homphobia/etc to be posted.

Yeah, I know people on the forums tend to be left-leaning politically, but it’s a small portion of the userbase. I was talking moreso about trope and work pages, which sometimes words stuff poorly that may come across as unintentionally offensive.

Honestly compared to AVEN forums, tvtropes is rather tame.

An interesting thing to note, is that although TV Tropes is mentioned alongside Cinema Sins as a cause for poor media criticism, it lacks the attribute that Cinema Sins has that is usually cited in particular (ie constant negativity). Rather, TV Tropes seems to be cited as a source of nitpicking, a way of breaking down unimportant things to make fun of.

Those criticisms in particular make me think some of the people criticizing the site haven't actually been on the site much, or at least completely missed the point.

The other reason, that the site has issues on the various work pages and the enduring connection with more...problematic opinions, I actually very much agree with. Which makes it all the more amusing when people also criticize the forums for the precise opposite reasons.

They might have a point but on the other hand, TV Tropes is a good start to your journey in understanding media.

I was surfing through some other website and I stumbled upon someone else’s comment that kinda illuminates why this site gets flack from media critics:

Yep. Same reasons why Cinema Sins and the Nostalgia Critic have done pretty significant harm to the popular discourse around film in particular. Anyone can dig at the superficiality for mistakes, plot holes, common ideas and structure.

Putting that into a holistic critique or larger overall cultural analysis is a skill.

And that's where you get stuff like newbie writers in our very own Writer's Block subforum who post asking how they can write a character who plays with some specifically named trope in a story that hasn't been started yet, sometimes without fully understanding what that trope even is or why it's a thing, or write things like "a Magnificent Bastard Chosen One with a Magical Girl Unwanted Harem, with members subverting Shana Clone, Rei Ayanami Expy, [etc., etc....] fighting an Evil Overlord". But- shocker! -they can't figure out how it would work.

There's a lot that goes into a functional narrative that can't be troped. I got back into writing through TV Tropes, and latched onto the "trope" approach because it was easy for my rigid Aspie brain to understand. I became one of those misguided newbies who kept enormous, constantly updated trope lists for stories and characters I hadn't written a word of. I didn't understand why I couldn't write any of those stories until I threw all those lists out, sat my ass down, and wrote. I do still use TVT in my writing process but for determining how other works have done things I want to do, not to generate new things to do.

Focusing on the tropes, in my experience, led to me not understanding how those blocks fit together and interact. That's where most media criticism and storycraft should lie. But that's subjective and complex, and complexity is hard.

There is a blog that talks about our site TVTropes, it is an old article and it is an interesting read. It is funny though that even though there are people that critical of the site as well as individuals that "critical" of the site, they are writers who actually defend the site arguing that it one thing to criticize the but it is another matter to completely trash the site and the people who use it. I found this line in NeoGAF:

I know TV Tropes is mostly a tool and that tropes are not cliches but it did help me become somewhat aware of the ideas being used in writing even if it was cursory understanding at best. I know now that writing is no just formulas an tropes but it can be used to help with characterization and structure.

Edited by GAP on Oct 21st 2018 at 1:50:35 PM

: In a way, it's possible to put random stuff like that together and make it work. But ideas that are good for helping an story doesn't exactly mean that those ideas will write the story for you. Since there's dialogue to write and a plot to weave. It's not going to kill to ask yourself,"Where will this wind up in the next few minutes?" or to consider how your audience might react to the motives of an prominent character.

For what it's worth, I mainly read the wiki to keep track of cultural trends. Even when I got into writing for an brief period, I just winged it. But then again, I'm not sure if I found this site yet.

I find it ironic that Ethical Slut is considered offensive, because it was started by Xzenu, a troper very much into sociology and social justice, who had a tendency to make trope articles that amounted to a long-winded essay on some real-world topic with a tangential link to something in fiction, with some ill-fitting examples and often (as here) a bad title. Some of their contributions have flourished, but they were told to stop making new articles.

That blogpost has a few good points to make, but they are lost in a verbal diarrhea of self-aggrandisement and pseudo-intellectualism. That the author still edits the site, and has lost none of their ego, worries me.

I think the most persistent source of bad rep comes from the tendency of the site to attract a certain type of author, what might be termed a "conceptual" story thinker. They can be great, and Asimov is the apotheosis, but when they are bad, they can be particularly annoying. The stories try too hard to be clever, and hardly try to be stories, because they're are nothing more than a bare few tropes. It's not that this site creates them, but it gives them the vocabulary and maybe too many ideas.

That page is just a swing and a miss. It basically boils down to "a good person who likes sex", which is...not really tropeworthy if you ask me, and described in a fairly offensive way.

I'll agree that overusing tropes as a writing device or trying to fit real life stuff into them doesn't usually go well.