I just discovered this Wiki, and hope I need not explain why it should be of great interest to all CS Dopers. Many typical thread topics I’ve seen raised in CS – like “Examples of bad movie physics,” or “Stories where the protagonist is a villain” – are treated even more exhaustively in tvtropes, and broken down into subtopics and links even you would not have imagined.
That site is a gigantic black hole for me. I frequently fall in and don’t come out until hours later. Fantastic stuff.
Lovely. ANOTHER time sink…
I’ll just have to get rid of one or three others to make room for this one.
Thanks!
Just for one example, could you have imagined there could be so many different species of tricksters?
I don’t know if I should appreciate this or depreciate it. I love the site, but man, the hours I’ve lost because I clicked on one link to TVTropes and ended up surfing that site.
Must … resist…urge…to…click …
It occurs to me the very existence of this site constitutes a Standing Trope Challenge: Write a story/screenplay that (1) is worth reading/watching and (2) employs none of the tropes listed.
Might be impossible. No new thing under the sun, you know.
See the Spider Robinson short story “Melancholy Elephants.” (Which itself probably does employ a listed trope, though none come to mind at the moment.)
I love it and it can consume large chunks of time for me. Where did you stumble across it BG?
Somebody linked to it in a CS thread, natch.
Can’t be done. I’ve spent quite a bit of time pondering this, and I’m convinced: can’t be done.
Looks interesting, but I don’t recognize most of their examples. The majority seem to be Japanese cartoons and video games which I am not very familiar.
There are loads of pure TV and Movie ones. I learned to skim right past all the Anime stuff as it means nothing to me. Additionally it is a wiki, so you are free to edit it. I have made some few corrections or additions.
I love TVtropes. I keep meaning to add more Batman comic and Thundercats examples, but I rarely can think of them before getting distracted.
And Literature and Real Life.
Not surprisingly, most of my edits have involved a certain Literary Work and 70s sitcoms.
Wouldn’t surprise me – the list is so exhaustive, and even the subversion/aversion of a trope counts as a trope in its own right. You could write a “slice of life” story where, as in real life, nothing follows narrative expectation – but who would want to read such crap?
Damn you BrainGlutton! That’s all I have time to say right now. I’m too busy wasting time in a brand new way.
I’d stumbled across this before, but hadn’t real;ized how extensive it was. \
“TV Tropes” seems like the wrong name – it’s more games, manga, and anime. And it seems to have a severe lack of knowledge about literature, despite their putting that in as a column.
Nevertheless, it’s a real education. I want to know how I can find my way to Marshmallow Hell.
(In RenFaires, it’s called a “Wench Press”.)
[shrug] “It” is a Wiki. Remedy the lack.
I found it a while back, and have already begun to use a fair bit of its terminology in discussing works of fiction. I love it, but yeah, it’s a huge time sink for me too.
My favorite articles?
“What do you mean it’s not awesome!?”
“What do you mean it’s not symbolic!?”
Just the titles give me a chuckle, but their descriptions and the lists of examples are both amusing and spot-on.