Notable References to TV Tropes

As noted below, this is a page of places that references to the original TV Tropes Wiki can or could be found in pop culture and other sources as of June 2012. It is maintained here on All The Tropes as a historical record. To record similar appearances by All The Tropes in the memesphere, go to this page.

— The Mgmt.

"Oh my god! TV Tropes used one of my quotes!" —Linkara

It's no surprise that the TV Tropes Wiki is the most popular website on the Internet, and, equally, it's no surprise that other webpages want to give us a Shout-Out, or that we would want to return the favor by shouting back to the pages that reference us.

Also see TV Tropes in Other Wikis, Weirdest Inbound Link of the Day, One of Us.

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Fan Fic

• Thinking in Little Green Boxes has Harry Potter celebrate when he learns we made a page for the fic here. He even passes out a link to the page to everyone.
• The Doctor Who This Time Round:
  • Storytime The Speckled Band, has Baby Mel shout "Did somebody order A Large Ham?" when Brian Blessed Expy Prubert Gastridge appears as the villain.
  • Another TTR story states at the bottom that it was written purely because the This Time Round entry said there wasn't a genderbent 'Round.
• Several chapters of Shinji and Warhammer 40 K refer to several tropes.
• Gregg Landsman, author of Nobody Dies, has referenced tropes in his story multiple times. For instance, Iruel greeting Asuka with "Hey there Woobie, how's Mommy treating you?", and Shinji somewhat-sarcastically referring to himself as a "Big Damn Hero". He even has a link to the trope page for Nobody Dies in the signature of his spacebattles.com account.
• Kyon: Big Damn Hero is a story that is described as a crossover between Haruhi Suzumiya and TV Tropes. Based on the massive number of tropes listed on the Main Trope page for the story, not to mention several tropes referred to by name, it's pretty safe to say that the author is One of Us.
• The author of Light and Dark - The Adventures of Dark Yagami was apparently pleased to find our entry on it. Dark randomly declares himself a "sutle [sic] Magnificent Bastard" as a Take That to the wiki claiming Dark had no subtle gambits, and we're suddenly told Near did a lot of supposedly evil things after TV Tropes claimed Near did nothing worthy of his Chew Toy status. Later, he thought it was awesome that User:Slowzombie is liveblogging it, Slow's eye problems notwithstanding.
• The round-robin, multibranching fic Switching Places/Eva! on the Anime Addventure. In this Neon Genesis Evangelion/Ranma ½ crossover, Rei Ayanami has begun using "TVTropes.jp" as a tool to help her understand human interactions. It's unclear whether this is a good idea or not.
• Progress has the author reccommend us to any readers who want to know what Cutie Mark Failure Insanity Syndrome is. Later we see 'Trope's Library of Literary Tools' in Celestia's library.

Printed Media, Blogs, and other Publications

• The September 2010 issue of Wired magazine featured a short article on us.

A visit to TVT&I will teach you three things: (1) originality is dead, (2) no one misses it, and (3) you’ve just blown six hours.

• Scans_daily mentions us a lot, especially in the comments (usually a link, accompanied by LOTS of warnings about life-ruining side effects.)
• Been mentioned in the editorial for the January edition of SFX magazine.
• Raocowcow has occasionally referenced us in his Lets Plays. In a video, after mentioning "Epileptic Trees", he outright tells people to visit the site.
• On Reddit.
• Allen Varney blogged about the site on Paranoia.
• MetaFilter likes us too, apparently.
• Let's hope the NaNoWriMo writers don't waste their time on TV Tropes when they should be writing.
• The site was reviewed on Killer Startups.
• Fritz Freiheit wrote about the site on his blog. He included a copy of the blog post on his wiki.
• The Hekman Library includes the site as a research resource.
• A blog called Grim Reviews.
• Bruce Sterling mentioned us on Wired blogs.
• This Boing Boing front-pager sticks out a bit.
• THE BBC! Yes, The BBC!
• The Viking's Progress, a blog by a Physician Assistant gives us a shout out here
• This Touhou fansite references some tropes and warns about the dangers of Trope Addiction with every link to this site. It's a Troper Works, and the main site of Touhou Nekokayou.
• A Semantic Web researcher discovers that we have the Linked Data nature,and that we may be able to teach the experts a thing or two about building data webs. Maybe this is why it's so addictive.
• NaNoWriMo's main page.
• At least one mention on a Television Without Pity recap, not to mention their forums.
• German weekly newspaper Die Zeit
• Cracked:
  • An article on bullshit stereotypes, linking to Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys and British Teeth.
  • On implausible TV and movie plots that actually happened linking to Switched At Birth.
  • They even have a page on us.
  • In the October 2010 Cracked contest for what the movie posters would look like for certain web sites, we had the winning poster.
  • Another Photoshop bit postulates TV Tropes the Board Game.
  • And another, found our Kryptonite
• The Agony Booth referenced a few trope titles in their review of Repo! The Genetic Opera, then page 5 features this tidbit:

This song is just awful, so much so that TV Tropes, which is run by people who like everything, lists this scene as Repo's Dethroning Moment of Suck.

• Here's a thing from io9, a great online 'zine for all things SFnal and cool.
• Dragonfree lovingly peppers her movie reviews with links to tropes that pop up in the Pokemon films.
• The LA Times had a look at us.
• Know Your Meme used this site to confirm if Youtube Poop was a meme. It's not just YTP, though. There are at least five other articles that have mentioned or linked back to this wiki.
• Arcade, Stanford University's salon magazine, has a write-up about us.
• Major online newspaper Slate.com has reference not once, not twice, not thrice, but a bunch of times:
  • Here under "a dog to kick"
  • Here referring to Xkcd referring to us
  • In this podcast.
  • An explicit reference and link here in an article about Lady Gaga's use of Naughty Nuns.
  • Two more links come from a lengthy examination of the Dead Horse Trope moving to Forgotten Trope of Quicksand Sucks in media.
• Fanfiction author Shadow Crystal Mage makes constant references to tropes by name, and admits outright that his goal is to be referenced on as many pages as possible.
• Amazing Ben has referenced this site in some of his articles.
• The site received an entry in the 2011 edition of Schott's Almanac, a catalogue of recent events, trends and phenomena, along with a list of some of the tropes present here.
• The Febuary 2011 issue of Maximum PC includes this site on a list of 101 websites everyone should see once.
• Wired's Geekdad recommends TVTropes to keep kids reading over the summer.
• The "distributed recommendation system" Skipforward provides a linked-data wrapper for TVTropes called DBTropes. Among other things, it provides a machine-readable interface to the wiki.
• Ralph Keyes mentions TV Tropes in the bibliography of his book Euphemania--though there's no mention in the main text.
• In this article in The Guardian on fanfiction, there's a direct reference to the trope Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls.
• The Macintosh Garden page for Lexi-Cross includes the game description from TVTropes.
• Nintendo Gamer Issue 76 references Contractual Boss Immunity in an article on boss battles.

Tabletop Games

• Changeling: The Lost, in the sourcebook Swords at Dawn, details Talecrafting, a way Changelings can tweak fate to force life to follow story conventions, such as the Rule of Three, the Evil Stepmother, or the elderly mentor. Guess what site they reference as a good place to find inspiration?

Video Games

• Kingdom of Loathing has a monster in its 2010 Christmas content called the "Tome of Tropes."

"You can't focus your attention on working, or on much of anything, so you turn to the nuclear solution of boredom: the Tome of Tropes. It's a giant book that explains and gives clever names to all of the recurring themes in literature, popular culture, and even real life. There are two things about the book that make it purest evil: the first is that anyone can add to it, so it's always changing and growing larger. The second is that every entry contains several references to other cleverly-named tropes, and touching one of those names sends you to an explanation of that trope's name, complete with references to other tropes... and at some point you look up and see you're eight years older than when you started."

• One of the Minecraft title blurbs reads: "Less addictive than TV Tropes!"

Webcomics

• As Dork Tower admits, TVTropes will indeed ruin your life.
• Errant Story: in one of the chapter commentaries, Bani calls Sara the Worf of Errant Story. Sara's response? "You're not allowed to read TV Tropes anymore".
• Trope-tan and Captain Obvious are characters in The Way of the Metagamer. The comic also directly mentions Avatar and The Airbending Fellowship of Vampire Slayers and tropes on This Very Wiki.
• Irregular Webcomic mentions this wiki in the notes a lot. So does Darths and Droids. As User:Dmmaus is a known Troper, this should be expected.
• This strip of Super Stupor.
• Stickman and Cube mentions us a few times. or at least refers to tropes by name.
• Nowhere University has references to this site.
• The commentary on this strip of Partially Clips.
• Phil Foglio has a link to us on the Girl Genius Fun Stuff page.
• Xkcd once mentioned us here. And linked the comic to this site. Randall Munroe is a cruel man, as the people in this thread can certify.
• This Shortpacked strip is titled (according to the accompanying blog post) "Is this something already covered by TV Tropes? I haven't checked yet". It is.
• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja recently had a strip that features a blurred website that looks veeeerryy suspicious.
• Order of the Stick: According to the Giant, he's aware of TV Tropes, but has never directly referenced it; everything that seems like a reference is Older Than They Think.
• At least two of the authors of Exterminatus Now are tropers, and Silversword is one of them. Eastwood is the other.
• In at least one El Goonish Shive strip, Dan has linked to TV Tropes in The Rant. Specifically, the Red Shirt page.
• Andrew Hussie of Homestuck has mentioned us a few times. While he doesn't completely agree with our specific list-based methods, he seems to like the general troping idea and has said that he's found a few articles to be interesting reads.
• Dinosaur Comics: The archive title of the Oct 28, 2009 page is "inspired by the tvtropes 'Weaksauce Weakness' page. tvtropes it great, it'll remind you of how ridiculous your body is, AND also suck up endless hours of your time".
• The Unspeakable Vault of Doom linked this site's "good summary" of Warhammer 40K in strip #341.
• Unwinder's Tall Comics: Barbecue Sauce has an anime to recommend.
• The chaps that create Virtual Shackles might well be tropers, as this comic references Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
• Ansem Retort has this as a sort of Take That joke to the site. Duke then added in his update that people check out the site, as well as a disclaimer that he doesn't edit his own page and leaves it up to the fans.
• A Path to Greater Good: Guido (who does occasionally post on the TV Tropes forum) wonders if there's a trope for that hair. (Anime Hair or Improbable Hairstyle, by the way.)
• Bobwhite: This page discusses the Tzadikim Nistarim. The Alt Text notes "This one is on TV Tropes for some reason."
• The commentary to this Critical Miss strip (referencing Assassin's Creed):

"The Templars are winning in the modern portion of the games because they finally have access to a certain website and thus can avoid embarrassing situations like the one illustrated in today's comic. That and they presumably outlawed hay."

• • When Erin went to visit her therapist in this strip he references several tropes to explain her mental problems. She accuses him of not being a real doctor and then the audience sees he has TVTropes open with "goatfuck crazy" in the search engine.

"Alright, Miss Stout. From what you've told me you have a severe case of... hold on... Sanity Slippage, which is an Ambiguous Disorder caused by... huh... You're now what we technically call a 'cuckoolander'."

• • After Erin takes Kratos' (from God of War) advice and try to destroy her friend's Xbox 360 and almost seriously harming another in the process, she gets thrown out of their house. She then decides to get drunk, and comments that "This is going to look terrible on my TV Tropes page."
• Johnathan Grey Carter, the writer of Critical Miss is pleased that it has a page:

One of our readers, some might say our best reader, has started a Critical Miss TV Tropes page! I've always wanted my own TV Tropes page. So much so I even considered starting my own. But that'd be kind of like like signing your own yearbook, or masturbating in public. It's just not done. Whoever started the page may step forward and receive a moderate amount of praise and adulation.

• On the Ears for Elves links bar, our page is the first entry in "extras". We are also now the official character sheet, being the link under "about", though the original page (which our content is heavily based off) is still there if you know the URL. These links account for the main page having >800 inbounds and the character page having 150, despite the main page only having 50 wicks, as of the 3rd of June 2012.

Web Original

• Nice essay on The Millions examining whether or not we have a chilling effect on creativity. Also relays some information about China Miéville's opinion of the wiki.
• Lore Sjöberg of Wired features us here. The page on the screen is Ridiculous Procrastinator.
• Moviebob lovingly kicks our asses. The good stuff kicks in on page 2.
• The Abridged Series of Neon Genesis Evangelion makes quite a few references.
• Linkara, made the exclamation "Oh my God! TV Tropes used one of my quotes!" during a "Previously On..." montage.

"...Spend HOURS at the Tv Tropes Booth!"

• Oancitizen has mentioned in his Ken Park commentary that he used us as a reference when looking up films to review, specifically the pages Le Cinema Artistique, True Art Is Incomprehensible and Euroschlock.
• CR of Familiar Faces mentions a character as The Woobie in his Top 10 Overlooked Christmas Specials, even mentioning us by name.
• FSTDT: On the top of this page, it says "The "High Octane Nightmare Fuel" Award". That page is the first thing linked on FSTDT's High Octane Nightmare Fuel page.
• The Nostalgia Chick:
  • Dedicated a whole video to Distaff Counterpart and The Smurfette Principle, using TV Tropes' names for both.
  • She strikes again in her review of Ever After, where she discusses The Woobie trope and mentions TV Tropes by name.
• Zero Punctuation has made references to trope titles in the past.
• Y Ruler of Time of Read Right To Left, the Manga review show on That Guy With The Glasses:
  • Uses a lot of trope names in his review of School Rumble, and displays the Tsundere page image as well.
  • In his later review of Let's Bible, he refers to TV Tropes by name, discussing the What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic trope, and even displaying the page as he talks. In subtitles, he admits that he visits the site, and also says that the above paragraph shouldn't count as an example of Notable References to TV Tropes, but that his present discussion should. The obvious solution? Have both of them as examples, of course.
• The SCP Foundation lists this site as an safe-class object: SCP 4445. (Granted, it's a joke entry, written in response to our article about them...) Seems that in the SCP-verse, this wiki is a front for the Foundation, used for psychological screening and recruitment. Also, in Supplemental Report 239-B-192. Not to mention members showing up on the forum occasionally.
• The Secret Life of Dolls has an installment titled after the trope He Who Fights Monsters. (Example is not an Older Than They Think. Cleo links to the article.)
• Princess Tutu Abridged often refers to tropes by name. An entire sub-plot was created because of a single run through the Shipping Tropes. It's the Shipping Bridge! And being put in a Cargo Ship is the worst thing that can happen. But no worries, the the entire plot is now focusing on Duck and Fakir. Drusselmeyer hates it.
• Dena, of That Guy With The Glasses' Game Den and Film Den shows referenced a character as The Woobie complete with an image of the page.
• The Blog The Slacktivist made one of its Left Behind criticisms here, with a reference to Mr. Exposition. This comment states:

We all knew this day would come. *Fred himself* has opened the door to the TV Tropes Abyss. clears schedule for rest of day*

• SF Debris has made a couple references in his videos, including a notice to alert the users of TV Tropes that he finally gave a Star Trek: Voyager episode a score of 10.
• Proton Jon is fully aware of TV Tropes and occasionally namedrops tropes.

The Superman LP has led to edits on the TVTropes entry for Superman 64. My work here is done.

• The guys at Yogscast referenced the site in the Yogscast Minecraft Series when they note when a safe path leads to nowhere but a dangerous path leads further.
• In Film Brain's review of Far Cry, he mentioned this site as he stated that he was a Slave to PR.
• Laci Green has a link to her entry on her site.
• Anita from Feminist Frequency did a six part series on tropes vs women, using this site as an inspiration. Tvtropes even gets referenced in one of the videos.