Self-awareness and metafiction don't equal post-modernism. This article talks about post-modernism as an artistic movement and then just discards all that and says "but here it's about metafiction". Why not just make a "metafiction" trope instead? I think this is in serious need of a clean-up and rework.
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
So... What the heck does Postmodernism mean as a trope?
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The music section is filled with Metafictional music. Postmodernism is not limited to metafiction: the music section should have more examples like Talking Heads, David Bowie, and John Cage.
Post modern is not limited to mere self-references. It can be a work jumping from genre to genre, bun not taking any of those genres quite seriously, or defying the existence of objective truth by creating multiple objective truthes, or a work that plays with viewers' expectations, or many other things. I think it's worth to create a category of postmodern tropes (or perhaps Sliding Scale Of Modernism Versus Postmodernism).
Neon Genesis? I know this'll start a fanfight, but I don't think Neon Genesis is a fitting example. Really, it's too easily explained as a modernist psychological allegory. Joyce is modernist - just because something is complex, confusing mindscrew does not make it postmodern, and, as Thomas Khun pointed out, modernists deconstruct - they simply suggest something to replace what they've deconstructed. The deconstruction of the form doesn't make Neon Genesis postmodern - just as the deconstruction of the epic doesn't make Ulysses postmodern. It is the deconstruction of the art form itself, and its attendant simacrula, that would cause that translation.
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^ agreed to an extent. Not sure why this whole trope is under the "Nineties" index either.
A Mind Screw for the sake of a Mind Screw is not Postmodernism, even slightly, as you say. It might fit under Dadaism.
Postmodernism has to embrace many ideas. It's a broad movement, as Modernism was. The fact that this page doesn't even mention hyper-realism (in the sense Baudrillard used it, not in the sense of "photo-realism, but more so") is a bit of a clue that tvtropes shouldn't be used as a serious resource for this kind of thing.
As should what looks suspiciously like a glib joke at Theodor Adorno's expense. Oh dear. Oh, this site, sometimes...
edit: this has since been fixed, so pay it no mind
The quote is a very bad quote to use because postmodernism, as the rest of the page tries to explain, does not mean "weird", its specifically about the work's self-awareness as a work. Meaning the quote is directly contradictory to the actual meaning of the movement and consequentially the rest of the page.
Edited by crashkey