TV Tropes/Tropes Expressed in The Wiki

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Tropes specific to the TV-Tropes Wiki

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Tropes 0-B

• 0% Approval Rating: Looking at TV Tropes.org's recent situation, you can't help but wonder whether most toxic of mods and admins in the site are either indifferent or proud in achieving this through their corrupt methods in handling the site.
• Accentuate the Negative: Darth Wiki.
• Artifact Title: It started with TV (Buffy the Vampire Slayer in particular). Nowadays it encompasses all media, insofar as their need for ad revenue allows them to.
• Artistic License: Law: Fighteer's belief that casually adding a non-negotiable, unilateral (and implicitly retroactive) claim to all contributors' copyrights to the TVT Administrivia page in 2012 was both legal and an appropriate response to contributor questions about their license status. Fortunately, the new management actually consulted a real lawyer about this in 2015 and backpedaled on it so quickly they left skid marks.
• Author Appeal:The wiki has several depending what fandom fixated on.
  • BlazBlue was pretty over-represented on their Pantheon (basically a place for users to gush about their favourite characters) even by the standards of a surprisingly-popular mix of Fighting Game and Visual Novel.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer was one the reasons the Tv Tropes was founded. Many of early tropes were named after Buffy characters.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Fans of the G4 of My Little Pony have made the trope lists much bigger than all other generations of My Little Pony Franchise combined.
• Bias Steamroller: Three main ones:
  • Pro-Team Lupa bias.
  • Anti-comic book movie bias.
  • Pro-left wing bias. This bias overrides the other two: a comic book movie or a Team Doug review will be spoken positively if it leans left.
• Beige Prose: The Laconic pages.
• Berserk Button: Probably easier to list what isn't one. Anyone for the Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment?
• Breaking the Fourth Wall/Leaning on the Fourth Wall: An editor of the site will often introduce themselves as "This Troper". This is frowned upon for examples, though.
• Blatant Lies: Many users have since come to regard statements concerning users' ability to "disagree with the site's editorial or administrative policies" as this.
  • Oh, that's perfectly true. You're just banned from the wiki if you admit it.
    • When your editing rights are removed, the message you get once you try to edit a page claims it's not a punishment (when that's exactly what it is) as it prevents a person from contributing even if the only reason given is them having consistently having minor mistakes that makes their stuff look "not neat", pointing this lie out will bring harsher punishment like a total site ban or more childishly in one example forcing the person to redirect to google when they try to access the site.
• Broken Base: The controversial policies every since the Second Google Incident have divided the community with some getting banned, some just leaving or some just founding forks of Tv Tropes.

Tropes C-E

• Censorship Bureau: The P5, who were formed in the aftermath of Google revoking their ads for the second time. Their job is to keep the wiki clean from porn.
• Cult of Personality: Although it's present around the and forums. It's more obvious in the forums and mod fiats. It's difficult to bring legitimate complaints about how the wiki is run and talk about problems about the moderation.
• Darker and Edgier:
  • The Useful Notes sections, detailing more darker facets about reality than fiction.
  • Of course, there's also Darth Wiki, where all the negative opinions go to, though since the wiki has been trying to purge as much negativity as possible, even the Darth Wiki has been severely pruned over time.
• Dark World: Darth Wiki.
• Death of the Author: Strongly underlies the philosophy of troping as defined by the site. However, the original idea was that authorial intent has no more weight than the audiences' interpretation of a work. However, this as apparently corrupted to mean audiences' view of a work (i.e. their head canon) is better than anyone elses even the authors themselves.
• Deader Than Dead: The moderation staff have made it clear that some pages will always remain salted (i.e. cut and locked). These pages are known as the Permanent Red Link Club. These pages were separated from Locked Pages
• Drinking Game: They have one, which we inherited.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Some of the trope titles, and increasing every day. These are listed in the Index of Exact Trope Titles.

Tropes F-H

• Grammar Nazis: The jannies especially, Fighteer takes this to an extreme by banning people with bad grammar with passable English getting targeted. It doesn't matter if the troper's handle on English is poor, the moderation demands near perfect English fluency. The result of this often times temp bans or a permaban.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Moderator Fighteer is known for this, especially towards those who have been suspended for any reasons; in his eyes, they are scum that don't deserve to participate at TV Tropes. He himself has admitted that he's like this to keep "troublemakers" in line and to intimidate trolls, though he has alienated a lot of people, and most of the people he has mistreated do not deserve it.
• Hive Mind: A conscious goal. They kick out anyone that doesn't conform. Anyone that wants talk about Tv Tropes without the being bothered by the moderation usually go to the reddit for Tv Tropes.
• Hurricane of Puns:
  • Just read the Just for Pun index.
  • The Sorting Algorithm of Tropes index qualifies, although the puns will likely slip under your radar if you don't have a computer science background.

Tropes I-L

• Jerkass: Most people there, moderator or user, although they hide their true nature when everything seems well. Kinda related, some of 'em over there seem kinda racist . Good luck finding pleasant users over there!
• Lampshade Hanging: For pages about tropes, there will a folder section for TV Tropes, lampshading how TV Tropes uses the trope explained on the page in some fashion. Very meta. Even more meta is the logo. Which is the Lampshade.
• Law of Wiki Expansion: Once Tv Tropes covered tropes from Joss Whedon shows and since expanded to cover tropes from all kinds of media. It's gotten a point where trope pages were split to describe a "sub-trope" in more detail.
• Lighter and Softer: Sugar Wiki, where all the positive opinions go to.

Tropes M-O

• Medium Awareness: References to how the site is a wiki are constantly referenced.
• Mind Screw: At least half the entries in Wild Mass Guessing.
• Moe Anthropomorphism: Trope-tan — and her little dog, too.
• Moral Guardians: On the one hand, they deny it, but on the other, the placeholders initially placed for deleted work pages like Pokegirls make it very clear they were deleted out of administrator outrage or disapproval of their content, not for any other reason. Works apparently must meet a minimum moral standard in order to be worthy of the honor of a TV Tropes page.
  • Averted with the mods due to their immoral policies and treatment of any users that don't participate in their circle-jerk.
• The Moral Substitute: In the wake of the Second Google incident, the administration cast its efforts to purge itself of revenue-threatening content as turning TV Tropes into the Moral Substitute for itself. In the years following, it's also managed to convince at least a part of its user base that All The Tropes and other forked troping wikis are run by perverts who focus on salacious material to the exclusion of anything else.
  • Other troping websites are essentially one for TVT, due to their fairer rules and better treatment of users.
• Orwellian Editor: The moderation staff routinely deletes anything they don't like or which dares to disagree with their opinions (They also delete those who do the disagreeing). Entire threads have been known to vanish when the subject matter ventures into areas that the mods simply don't want discussed. They are aided in this by PMWiki's bare-minimum history feature, which retains little more than the last couple dozen edits (let alone a full audit trail back to the page creator), and which provides no simple mechanism for restoring deletions.
  • Plenty of tropers think they own the pages they edit and patrol them, changing/deleting anything they don't fully agree with. For example, rva98014 thinks they own every animated film page, earning the ire of several tropers. He has since been perma-banned for edit warring, one of a very small percentage of banned users that actually deserved it.
• Overused Running Gag: Reality Is Unrealistic and So Yeah were so overused that the wiki said "enough is enough!" and purged all mention of them from the wiki, deleting and perma-locking their pages.

Tropes P-S

• Political Overcorrectness In keeping with no negativity and the forums and wiki actively purging problematic articles and forum posts, the wiki went a little extreme with it.
• Post Modern: Plenty of examples. Since the site is a catalog of devices used in fiction, the whole site is this.
• Punny Name: Quite a few article titles.
• Rant-Inducing Slight:
  • An August 2015 article on Cracked.com deftly skewered TVT for the more ridiculous, tone-deaf and flat-out disturbing "Real Life" examples that show up on trope pages (some of which, we will admit, we have inherited and still have lurking about on ATT). TVT's user base decided that they had been "betrayed" by Cracked.com and all but declared war on the website.
  • Because of their biases, anything they perceive as pro-Team Doug, pro-comic book movie/anti-Scorsese Crowd and pro-right wing will inevitably trigger one of these.
  • Anything a user says or does that a mod doesn't fully agree with.
• Running Gag: Several, most commonly "Tropes Will Ruin Your Life".
• Schmuck Bait: A lot of external links are this. Notable offenders:
  • Ear Worm: Prepare to be hearing the piece of music from that link for the rest of the day.
  • Rickroll: Do we really need to explain this one?
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them:
  • Fast Eddie's sole guiding principle during his final years as owner of the site, starting with the Second Google Incident. A good case in point: when he established the P5 he expressly reserved the right to overrule them and delete something he didn't like even if they felt it was "safe" for the site, just because he didn't like it — while holding up the P5 as having the "final authority" over wiki content.
  • The mods, since they expect every user to behave well, unless there's a user involved that did something the mods don't agree with, in which case they will allow users to treat the victim like crap. The mods' treatment of users also makes them hypocrites.
• Seen It All: Read the site enough and take it too seriously, and you may become this.
• Self-Demonstrating Article: A whole index of them.
• Small Name, Big Ego: This a problem with the mods and several tropers.
• "Stop Having Fun!" Guys: The admins and mods. Also, some users that look for non-existent trouble.
  • There also appeared to be a clique of tropers who for some years actively patrolled the Made of Win pages specifically to find things to delete.
• Sudden Morbid Monologue: A lot, and often at the most unexpected of times.
• Sugar Bowl: What the "no negativity" directive strives to make the entire wiki. Too bad there's plenty of negativity anyways.
• Suicide Dare: Fighteer did this in 2024 and, no, he's not apologized for it.

Tropes T-U

• Theme Naming: Their trope-naming "organizations", SPOON, FORKS, KNIVES, and PLATTER, were all named after kitchen utensils.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The overly harsh punishments handed out to users that accidentally break a rule or even worse, do something that isn't bad but is perceived as bad anyway.
• Think of the Advertisers!: The primary motivation for the content purge in the wake of the Second Google Incident.
• Thrown Down a Well: The Permanent Red Link Club.
• Tropes Will Ruin Your Life: You thought we were kidding? Many past and present users have been left very disappointed at how the site is run.
• Unreliable Expositor: Tropers in that site, be it regular users or mods, may appear as this given to their tendency to exaggerate certain topics (particularly ones within Tear Jerker and YMMV lists), adding dubious information in articles they made (ex. suggesting the titular monster from Shin Godzilla can absorb organic life like The Thing or Alex Mercer and James Heller), and made little effort to add references for certain infos to prove their validity, particularly ones listed in Word of God and Word of Saint Paul. Not to mention some may be against keeping certain pages up to date like in this site given to their detrimental behavior.

Tropes V-Z

• Visual Pun: Some of the images for their trope articles are this.
• Wiki Walk: It's a wiki, what else would you expect?
• Wimpification: The evolution of TVT from a free-wheeling New Media entity open to every possible point of view into a site so thin-skinned and unable to bear a single word of criticism, from either within or without, that it will casually deny the very existence of the critic — and bans its own users for even mentioning them.

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