I love that all of Inigo Montoya’s speech has named several tropes: Hello! My Name Is Inigo Montoya. You Killed My Father. Prepare to Die.
The legend has returned.Off the top of my head;
- I don't think a lot of people realize Jerkass was named as a reference to The Simpsons since it's not immediately obvious that it's a reference
- Similarly, Big Bad was a reference to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and it's now the most used trope on the site.
- Buffy also gave us Buffy Speak, Butt-Monkey, Insane Troll Logic and "Funny Aneurysm" Moment, among others.
- The Other Darrin works given the context it was used in the trope namer (The new Darrin looks nothing like the old one)
- A Wild Rapper Appears! (a Pokémon reference for a trope used almost exclusively in music)
- Xanatos Gambit has somehow managed to avoid being renamed since it was launched in 2007. I don't think I've heard anyone talk about Gargoyles outside of this wiki before.
- Same goes for Xanatos Speed Chess.
- And the Rest, Gilligan Cut and Just Eat Gilligan. How many tropers nowadays can actually say they've seen Gilligan's Island? note
- Betty and Veronica was named after Archie Comics characters but it's a type of Love Triangle. Just like Xanatos Gambit, it also hasn't been renamed since its launch in 2007.
- Narm just sounds like a funny word, and it's pretty fitting for its definition (a serious moment that unintentionally comes off as funny). Nobody talks about Six Feet Under though.
- Cowboy BeBop at His Computer is a statement that feels wrong to anyone who knows about the show, which is perfect for what it's about.
- Believe it or not, After Show was named after AfterMASH, the After Show for M*A*S*H. I can't blame you if you've never heard of it before.
- "Sesame Street" Cred is also a pretty great name. (The trope is a celebrity guest starring on a kids' show)
I think Cowboy BeBop at His Computer does have some Fan Myopia issues, but before I knew the context of the anime, I used to picture it as "Cowboy BeBop" being the person writing the fraudulent reviews for media on his computer.
Don't take this the wrong way... bu it's funny you made that particular OP just now, because I've recently noticed several posts in cleanup and other threads mentioning the term "Whammy", and when I did I found myself repeatedly thinking it was a utterly bizarre and obtuse piece of jargon.
On a positive note, I will second "Sesame Street" Cred being a genuinely funny name, although I'm still not sure how intuitive it is. (I probably shouldn't go into too much detail, though, because a lighthearted Yack Fest thread isn't the right place for extreme cynicism...)
Edited by nrjxll on Apr 28th 2021 at 4:45:54 AM
Eh, I might be biased, cuz the more I thought about it, the more I realized it is kind of obtuse. I even admitted it in the OP.
I still think The Scrappy is still decent, but that's cuz it's part of the lexicon anyway.
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe."And The Rest" is kind of one of the better uses of a trope namer I think, because if you've never seen the show it just comes off as a totally straightforward description of what the trope's about.
A lot of the good ones sound like plain descriptions if you don't get the reference.
Yup:
Decent ones have a bit of fannish flare but you can still kind of glean what it's about, eg. Amazing Technicolor Wildlife and snowclones.
There's also the very rare case where the work came up with the phrase and it's now in the lexicon, eg. Star-Crossed Lovers. A modern example would probably be Kryptonite Factor.
Alright, here's some more:
- My God, What Have I Done? was named after a line from a Talking Heads song.
- Know When to Fold 'Em was named after a line from a Kenny Rogers song.
- Pretty much any trope named after a song: The End of the World as We Know It, Sympathy for the Devil, Ride the Lightning, Ring of Fire, Dr. Feelgood, Money for Nothing, Istanbul (Not Constantinople), etc.
- Yoko Oh No is just a funny name. Who even remembers Yoko Ono?
- Americans Hate Tingle and Germans Love David Hasselhoff never seem to get confused for anything else
- The Cake Is a Lie is a dead meme at this point, but it made a pretty good name for a trope.
- Companion Cube, like the one above, also comes from Portal.
- 1-Up, Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch, Go-Karting with Bowser, Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing and Your Princess Is in Another Castle! all came from the Super Mario Bros. franchise.
- The opening scene of Zero Wing named five tropes: All Your Base Are Belong to Us, For Great Justice, Somebody Set Up Us the Bomb, War Was Beginning and You Have No Chance to Survive.
- Leeroy Jenkins: another dead meme, but another healthy trope.
I really like the name for Country Matters for a few reasons.
It stems from an old term for sex stuff, with Hamlet being the Trope Namer, but those unfamiliar with the source material would still pick up on the pun. It also works as a subtle double meaning — since the trope is about how different national cultures respond to the word "cunt," it is literally about how your country matters when using the word!
Edited by mightymewtron on May 24th 2021 at 8:48:48 AM
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.McNinja, because the Mc is very non-japanese sounding even if you’re not familiar with the webcomic (I’m not tbh).
Ultimate Lifeform is named after Shadow from the Sonic franchise. It perfectly describes what the trope is about.
Rock'n'roll never dies!![]()
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I often refer to the French hardware superstore chain Leroy Merlin as "Leroy Jenkins", but pronounced in French ("Le-rwah Jen-can") Just For Pun.
But, some of the trope names are less obvious for Europeans, like The Other Darrin, anything related to Gilligan's Island, and for Central and Eastern Europe, things related to Archie Comics, for example.
However, the Buffy Speak used for the names like Big Bad and Insane Troll Logic is fairly descriptive in itself, despite being odd. Same goes for Jerkass - someone's being a jerk and an ass at the same time. The Scrappy however, didn't strike me as inspired by Scooby-Doo, particularly when connected to the fairly good pun in Rescued from the Scrappy Heap. And when you think about it: how many of the episodes would end up with Scrappy pulling the bedsheet off the ghost with his teeth and exposing the real estate fraudster underneath?
Edited by NotSoBadassLongcoat on May 26th 2021 at 3:41:18 PM
"what the complete, unabridged, 4k ultra HD fuck with bonus features" - Mark Von LewisFor some reason I was thinking about Grievous Bottley Harm and Grievous Harm with a Body. Both are puns on "Grievous Bodily Harm", an English legal term
that might not translate culturally note , but still get the basic idea across ("harming someone with a bottle" and "harming someone with a body" respectively)
Edited by MikeK on Jul 4th 2023 at 9:15:57 AM
Go to the Euphemism, one of the more recent trope namers (to the best of my recollection), from Halloween Is Grinch Night. It's just such a fitting name for the spirit of the trope (euphemisms for answering the call of nature)!
Oh, I believe in yesterdaySpeaking of trope namers, was Short Run in Peru a trope namer? Because if it is, it has lasted for a good long while
Garth Marenghi's Darkplace is apparently the Trope Namer, since it's mentioned that the In-Universe show had a "brief run in Peru". The trope name is a misquote of the original: the other examples I've got are...
- Beam Me Up, Scotty! itself
- With This Herring (originally "with a herring!")
- Timmy in a Well, since those words are never spoken on Lassie, as that scenario never actually happened
- Luke, I Am Your Father (originally "No, I am your father!")
About good trope namers: The Starscream and The Watson have few to no better titling options that would encapsulate everything about the characters without being wordy or clunky, and Bond, James Bond will probably be the most obvious work-named on this website for all time. It's the one I'd save if I had to choose one trope to be the only work-named trope on here.
Edited by andrewthetroper on Jul 3rd 2023 at 2:08:53 PM
The pessimist sees a dark tunnel, the optimist sees a light, the realist sees two lights and the engineer sees three idiots.The Big-Lipped Alligator Moment. Even its acronym (BLAM) is fitting; when it comes out of nowhere, it hits us with a blam! (Though the original scene may not count, as King Gator does come back at the end, and Anne-Marie does get all sickly from being in the bad water. I still like the title though.)
Oh, I believe in yesterday
Since the relevant scene isn't actually a BLAM due to the long reaching effect it ends up having on the story, This Index Is Not an Example. Something similar is at play with The Red Stapler, which is actually Defictionalization because the full-size red staplers in Office Space were painted and Swingline didn't make them before the film came out, but the dissonance between the Trope Namer and the actual situation doesn't matter here because "the red stapler" still conjures the image of a generic object blowing up due to media showing it off.
Edited by andrewthetroper on Jul 4th 2023 at 2:32:22 PM
The pessimist sees a dark tunnel, the optimist sees a light, the realist sees two lights and the engineer sees three idiots.![]()
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I'd argue The Watson is considerably better than The Starscream because the former is literally a part of English at this point - calling a character another character's "Watson" is not limited to our site. The latter, while lacking a pithy renaming option, more a case of grandfather clause than anything.
Notably, Epileptic Trees and Voodoo Shark are better off with their current name because of the lack of clarity of their names, since both convey insane things (insane fan theories and explanations that just raise more questions respectively), and Big-Lipped Alligator Moment holds the same logic.
In the same vein, The Dragon will never change because it's an offsite term, as is Jumping the Shark (and Voodoo Shark itself).
Edited by andrewthetroper on Jul 4th 2023 at 6:04:44 PM
The pessimist sees a dark tunnel, the optimist sees a light, the realist sees two lights and the engineer sees three idiots.Like a Surgeon is one of those cases where the trope namer not actually being an example is still just fine - the trope really has very little to do with "Weird Al" Yankovic's song of the same name, but given it's a trope about treating non-surgical situations like a surgery, it still works.
Cold turkey's getting stale. Tonight I'm eating crow.Somehow, Jossed kind of seems to work even if you don't know much about Joss Whedon or why it was named after him (I didn't, but I also got used to the term during my early TVT years) - helps that it's similar to "tossed", as if to say the theory is now "tossed away".
I also like the Zero Wing-named tropes, but I'm kind of biased there lol
Edited by Zanreo on Jul 17th 2023 at 12:07:34 PM
My favorite failed console tbhYeah, the ones that have basically just become "a phrase that means the thing" without necessarily needing to be relevant outside of it (Jossed, BLAM, etc) seem fine to me. I've argued in the past about how those names don't need to change because for better or for worse the wiki understands what they mean, even if they're incomprehensible when you think of them in isolation.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper Wall

We all know that it's very difficult to directly name a trope after a character or work without it being subject to Fan Myopia. However, some of these tropes have lasted a good while despite their trope name being a reference, because something about the name makes the trope clear anyway. (Or they're just fun names.)
What are some Trope Namers that you think actually still work?
The ones that were on my mind starting this thread are The Scrappy (because the connotations of "scrap" bring to mind throwing something away, which emphasizes how redundant a Scrappy is to a story) and, to a degree, Whammy (not as indicative, and I wouldn't be opposed to a rename but similar idea: I think the connotations of "wham" bring to mind a roadblock).
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.