What is "Troper Tales" and why was it banned?

So, I keep reading about something called Troper Tales, but what was it exactly? I know a "troper" is a user on this site, so was it something like Yack Fest?

And also, why was it banned? Part of it seems to have been due to being too NSFW, but other things, like images and videos, have rules to prevent NSFW stuff, so, and I'm not judging, I'm just curious, why couldn't this?

From what I understand, not having been here when this existed...Troper Tales was a subwiki/namespace where people could discuss their own real-life experiences. It was taken down because it lead to a lot of squicky, made-up, or outright disturbing stories and other people made fun of us for it.

It was removed because it was essentially people talking about themselves and how they experienced tropes, which went downhill fast. Pertinent reading.

I'm not familiar with the details myself since I joined the site long after the Troper Tales practice got discontinued, but it appears to be a really old holdover of a time when TV Tropes was a very chaotic place, encouraging many things that are deemed unacceptable today. Stuff like Word Cruft and This Troper were very common, and I'm guessing the problems just piled up to the point the staff just had enough, and pulled the pages from the site.

I remember at least one troper tales page ending up on the permanent redlink club before the whole thing was dumped like a hot potato: Berserk Button, because it was attracting overly-detailed descriptions of violence people wanted to inflict on others.

Then there were troper tale pages for things like the incest tropes and other tropes that already had problems with creepiness without tropers going in and expressing their creepy fantasies (I think there were troper tales for some of the rape tropes as well *shudder*). I think you can see why they got rid of it

Basically this.

Way back in the days before Google Incidents, the wiki was smaller and lacked even the thinnest veneer of professionalism that it has today. Everything was weirdly in-jokey, half the tropes were named after characters that you probably haven't heard of, and Haruhi was a big deal for some reason. In that era, Troper Tales was a section where tropers could write about their real life experience with certain tropes, usually written in "this troper" form. At its best, it was harmless but off-mission. For example the troper tales page for Percussive Maintenance had anecdotes about people starting their car with a hammer or killing the blue screen of death with a three-hole-punch. At its worst, it was, to use the technical term, creepy as fuck.

Eventually (and the Google Incidents had a lot to do with it) we decided that whatever good there was wasn't worth the bad, and opted to nuke it from orbit. There was some talk at the time about replacing it with a forum thread, but it never amounted to anything. These days it's only a (slightly embarrassing) footnote in wiki history. If someone removes an example from a page with the example reason "troper tales," it means that what they're removing is a personal anecdote.

Man, the ancient culture of the site was weird. I find it kind of fascinating to read older ATT discussions and the like, but even that's too recent to really get the full picture of the chaos this site used to be.

I have been around since 2009 and troper tales were a guilty pleasure of mine. They contained an unimaginable amount of cringe. I kinda miss them but they definitely deserved the axe.

The "This Troper" epidemic was itself kind of fascinating in how it arose.

As You Know , there's a rule (Or at least very strong advisories) against putting things in first person on trope pages. "This Troper" came about because in the ancient times, that rule was phrased as something like "Avoid using 'I' wherever possible on the Wiki. If you absolutely must write in first person, consider using 'This Troper' instead."

As it turned out, there was an implied third sentence to that rule, to the effect of "But seriously, there should be no reason to ever use first person especially in trope examples". The staff of the site later admitted "We THOUGHT that implied third sentence was obvious, so we didn't bother stating it explicitly. In hindsight, yes, we really should have, because it apparently wasn't as obvious as we thought."

Edited by Emptyeye on Jan 28th 2021 at 8:41:39 AM

Troper Tales was originally conceived as a way to divert personal experiences away from trope commentary, specifically the Real Life sections, much like the awesome/heartwarming/tearjerker pages for works. They not only became a bin of controversial subject matter talking about incest, rape, violence, death, etc but became mini-forums where other editors would comment on examples given. I don't have the exact timeline in my head but eliminating Troper Tales came alongside a more strict division with the Sugar Wiki and Darth Wiki and trying to keep those things separate, and "This Troper" was cut away as common wiki parlance anywhere.

Edited by EmeraldSource on Jan 27th 2021 at 9:47:04 AM

There was also a lot of stuff that was just obviously people making stuff up to get comments or one-up each other on any particular page. Badass and its affiliates tropes come to mind.

Granted, Random Number God was really funny. And Beware the Nice Ones or Yandere gave us this gem:

To which someone sarcastically responded:

I would like to add here: while the Troper Tales became infamous for being self-aggrandising, creepy, or just stupid, the final decision to axe them came after the worst of these had been scrubbed off, and came from the observation that most did not fit the trope in question. By one count, one in six would not be considered a shoehorn on the main page. The reason was simple: unlike most pages on the wiki, TT did not attract the attention of editors who cared about writing standards, and indeed likely repulsed them. With its format awkwardly straddling a wiki and a forum, it was not even clear what rules entries should follow. (Headscratchers still has this problem.) Editorial standards ended the namespace, but not for the reason you might think.

They were moved to their own wiki, but it seems nobody cared for it and it was lost when the wikia webhost went down. You can still find most through the Wayback Machine.

I remember the NSFW ones were being spread around outside the site and causing drama. Unfortunately we had a bunch of anime related pedophilia entries back in the day and it attracted a certain despicable variety of humanity like blowflies to a corpse, especially with a few infamous TT entries relating to it.

I think we've about exhausted this trip into TV Tropes nostalgia. Unfortunately, the mere mention of Troper Tales can bring back the sorts of people and conversations that we tried to get rid of.