Troping your own fics

Thanks for the explanation. I'm usually not bothered if the meaning of my story gets interpreted differently, since everyone has their rightful opinion on how a written line can be interpreted. Although it does bothers me a bit when there's a factually wrong entry in my page more out of my own omission, because there's no way the character in my story would know how canon timeline would have worked therefore have no idea they don't have something their canon counterpart had.

To be more specific, canon had a way to give free stats boost upon level up, which I airbrushed out of my story because I hated that mechanic (mostly for how easy it was to unlock it). The characters in my story obviously have no idea they aren't getting the raw stats boost they had in canon so it's never mentioned 'hey, we aren't getting canon's raw stats boost', and the reader assumed it still existed but simply aren't mentioned in my story. I feel like outright deleting that entry is a bit disrespectful to the guy who went through the trouble of entering it. And I was wondering if I can simply add an annotation to say this specific mechanic doesn't exist in my own fanfiction AU.

Edited by Qinlongfei on Feb 6th 2021 at 6:33:24 AM

So, what would it take for someone to write the YMMV and Trivia sections of my page for the fanfic Dark Hearts?

Lover of anime, video games, old-school Rock & Roll music, yaoi, horror, motorcycles, classic cars, trains, and historical fiction

Someone to read it and want to post some YMMV?

I'm sketchy myself about adding tropes to my own works, but if there are clear examples and it is blatant that the tropes apply to them, there's no reason not to put tropes on your work pages. I think the key thing here is examples. As long as it isn't YMMV, Awesome, Heartwarming, etc. or any other opinion sort of page, you can provide your own tropes provided you got examples to back it up that reflect trope description. I don't think anyone is going to fault you for that.

So, if we're unsure about starting up a tropes page for a fanfic we create, can we put it in a sandbox to practice being objective with our own works?

Yes. In fact, preparing your works page in a sandbox is an extremely good idea. It’s always best to get things right before posting something like this up.

I’m happy to provide suggestions once you have a page up, sandbox or otherwise. Contact me via PM if you want.

The only reason I haven't made a page for Runic Notation is because I wrote a side-story to it, and I'm paranoid that I'd end up aggrandising myself.

Okay, so since I asked around a bit to make sure everything was as objectively written as possible, I decided to make a tropes page for my BlazBlue/RWBY fic:

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BlazBlue Alternative: Remnant

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But just in case, I'll also ask here. Does everything look as objective as possible and do the tropes match the descriptions? I made it a point to do my best to trope like an average troper rather than an author.

Took an initial cursory look, and it seems really good so far. I’ll stop back soon to take a deeper dive and get back to you.

Edited by BoltDMC on Oct 21st 2021 at 4:50:34 AM

Just read the page in detail. I fixed two things (feel free to look and make sure I did them correctly).

There's one thing I wasn't quite sure how to correct, as I wasn't quite sure how to fix it. Under Shout-Out:

During initiation, when he realizes he and Noel are lost, Jaune's immediate thought is "Oh crapbaskets", much like Gohan and Trunks from Dragon Ball Z Abridged.

The wording isn't quite clear. Is the phrase "Oh crapbaskets" something the characters say in Dragon Ball Z Abridged? If so, maybe this:

During initiation, when he realizes he and Noel are lost, Jaune's immediate thought is "Oh crapbaskets", something also said by Gohan and Trunks in Dragon Ball Z Abridged.

or something similar.

Hope this was helpful. Looks great otherwise!

eruptor142: two issues that need to be fixed on your works page:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/Ben10Reincario

1. The trope description for Expy says it's for one character only. Unfortunately, composites like your example don't count. Maybe this could be moved to Shout-Out, but not sure about that.

2. You have a slash trope entry:

Sand Blaster / Sentient Sands

These aren't allowed. You'll have to list it as two entries, assuming they both qualify. If need be, repeat the description in each entry.

Didn't Bolt DMC do that?

Check out my forum game: Rate the above YMMV.

Not sure what you mean?

On my works page, all expy entries are tied to single characters, not ones who are an amalgam of multiple characters. I also have no slash tropes there.

It also looks like eruptor fixed the issues on their works page themselves after I posted.

Edited by BoltDMC on Nov 1st 2021 at 7:02:56 AM

I was replying to the OP.

Check out my forum game: Rate the above YMMV.

I still roll my eyes at myself every time I remember that I troped my own damn fic years ago. The story is unpublished pending a rewrite I've been putting off for years, so chances are the link to it doesn't even work anymore. I'd actually be happy if a moderator could delete the page outright (though they probably can't).

Not to cast aspersions on others who trope their own works. I have no doubt it can be done well. I just don't think that was my case.

Edited by Arbron on Dec 19th 2021 at 12:17:26 PM

I'm currently troping my own fanfiction on my sandbox (because School Days is not ready for a works page in any way).

Definitely gonna be using this thread. Very handy source.

I don't know what I'm doing honestly and I'm sorry for all the dumb questions. Also, I had no idea I had an account until like 2020.

I'm still figuring out this site, and after reading this thread; I'd rather somebody else do those things for my fics- specifically my Peanuts works since I found my way around there, and there was only, like one fic. I've written several, but seeing one, or both of my long fics on here, would be cool.

It's da Jax!

I'm in an odd situation. My fic that has a page was added to Fanfic Recs by other people, and they didn't know that I was a troper at the time. After the recommendations exploded, I decided to make a page for it.

That was about twelve years ago.

Nowadays when I look at the inbound wicks that others added to trope pages, they look like borderline ZCE and I worry that someone is going to remove them from their pages, because they were written back when we had looser rules on what constitutes a good example. But not a lot of people on this site are willing to rewrite ancient examples unless they really care about the subject matter, and most people don't anymore. I'm pretty much the only one who would want to improve the examples, but it feels wrong because that would be self-aggrandizing and some of those examples are on YMMV pages.

And yet it doesn't seem like my fic is unimportant or forgotten. People still talk about it on other sites, it still gets favorites, and it was added to a subreddit's list of the all-time great fics a couple of years ago.

So I don't know. Is rewriting other people's examples for my fic a sign of egotism or is it devotion to making the site better? Or both?

To my knowledge, the guidelines for troping one's own works boil down to the concept that, for the purposes of troping your own works, you're just another editor on the site; you don't get special privileges, but neither are you banned from all interaction. The specific guidelines as they're present on The Fic May Be Yours, but the Trope Page Is Ours are these:

My personal advice to you would be this: avoid the YMMV entries. Other than that, however, if you wish to expand bare-bone examples or ZCEs or to correct factually wrong information, that is your right as a site editor. As long as you make sure to avoid gushing and stick to the facts, which is how everyone should write examples anyway, that isn't self-aggrandizement, it's perfectly respectable site upkeep. ZCEs are a huge problem on the site, and, if you happen to have the knowledge and inclination to go around correcting them, then you go right ahead and do that.

Edited by Theriocephalus on Jan 13th 2023 at 4:55:17 AM

This oughta be sticked in the first post.

"Exit muna si Polgas. Ang kailangan dito ay si Dobermaxx!"

I was wondering if I should make a trope page for InkyFuture myself (I was worried it would be self-aggrandizement and tooting my own horn, really), but then I found the rules that said "it's fine just stay clear of the YMMV pages" and I ended up going for it anyway. Since then it's just been me and one other person maintaining the page, and now I mainly stay hands-off unless it's to correct errors. Now it's surprisingly dense in terms of tropes, though I probably should work on some cross-referencing here and there.

Took a stab at this myself, making one for Things Left Behind, a Valkyria Chronicles fic I finished earlier in the year. Honestly, it was a pretty fun way to both summarize the details of the story and get used to how editing works. Fair bit of work, to be sure, and I'd appreciate any feedback, but I found it helpful to sort out what I intended versus what's factually there on the page. Other posts here were also quite handy with the basic do's and don'ts.

Hope this isn't necroposting, but in late January, I made a page for a funny series of KH videos I made (not sure what they count as; they're not exactly crack, but I doubt they qualify as YTP, so idk). I knew it was silly, but I did it anyway, because I've been lurking on TV Tropes since I was an eighth grader (eventually made an account sometime in high school) and it's become sort of a comfort site for me. Troping makes me happy :)

I felt kinda bad about it, though, so I decided to do some "good deeds" and help out with some of the works needing tropes. Besides, I've done other things on this site before all that, so I'm not just using TV Tropes as a vehicle for self-promotion, and that's what matters.

I hope to make a page for Outgrown Such Childish Things once I have more chapters out.

I have a lot of dreams in terms of writing, like doing a book signing at my local bookstore one day, or seeing my books on the shelves at a library, but one of them is that a fan will make a work page for something I've written. Unlikely, I know, but a girl can dream.

Angel Aid Bomb Beam!