TV Tropes/YMMV

YMMV Quotes ( Funny Heartwarming Awesome) Fridge Analysis Trivia WMG Image Links Memes Haiku Laconic

These things about TV Tropes are subjective - not everyone will agree with all of them.

• Acceptable Targets:
  • In general: comic book movies (unless they lean left), Team Doug (with the exception of left-leaning videos), and anything and everything right-wing.
  • Fighteer, for better or worse, is the face of Tv Tropes' moderation of the wiki and the forums. He is a favorite punching bag for a lot of ex-fans and former users of the site, who cite his tendencies to talk down to people, tells people to kill themselves, throw out bans like they're candy for petty issues like bad grammar and spelling, and in general acting like a tyrant on a power trip despite being a moderator on a website as one of their biggest issues with the site and its mod staff. Even after his (forced) resignation in late 2022 — and according to this tumblr post, he was asked to return as a TVT mod in September 2023 — he remains an emblem of everything that was wrong with TV Tropes' moderation style since well before the Second Google Incident.
  • Inside the site, Ike Perlmutter, an Israeli-American billionaire. Trivia pages outright call him racist. The origin behind such hostility apparently derive from unpopular decisions he took as CEO of Marvel, and a disputed quote of him calling black people "all the same".
  • The "Intimidating White Presence" trope picture calls it "Truth on Television", while the "Scary Black Man" page outright says it is racist in origin. And in case you think the creators of the latter do not know the previous one exists to somehow excuse the racism against white people, the very page links to "Scary Black Man". It's like TV Tropes Failed a Spot Check for rampant hypocrisy.
  • Any corrupt media mogul is quickly compared to Rupert Murdoch, thanks to his association with Fox News, an American cable channel said to have a right-wing bias.
  • Once Donald Trump became president of the USA, users compare any Corrupt Corporate Executive to him, no matter how distant they are in appearance or personality.
  • Despite the fact Persona 5's main villain Masayoshi Shido's ideology is never mentioned and in fact, it's pointless to mention since it would distract from the fact Shido is only interested in power, Tv Tropes says he's a right-wing ultranationalist and compares him to Shinzo Abe, a right-wing politician that was prime-minister at the time of release.
• Archive Panic: You're gonna need a lot of time to read all the pages.
• Broken Base:
  • The act of Locking Pages. Those for it state that the pages that do end up getting locked are usually prime targets for vandalism or arguing and that locking them forcefully stops any fighting in edits. Those against it don't like that the whole community ends up being punished because of the actions of a few people and feel that the people who vandalize pages should be banned/suspended instead of cutting off the page from everyone. They also point out that Locked Pages tend to become outdated with time since no one can do anything on the page. This is best seen in pages that have been locked for years and consequentially have many redlinks and/or outdated entries attributed to them.
  • The "No Negativity" rule. Those for it feel that negativity tends to quickly go out of control and that negative entries tend to start sounding opinionated. By not having negativity, entries would sound more like how TV Tropes pages are meant to sound, as if they were written by one person. Those against it state that negative entries, while having the potential to get out of control, also provide fan insight on a work or situation and that depriving pages of that also gets rid of the context on why something is so controversial. This is also very much so an Informed Attribute, as TV Tropes is very openly negative about stuff they don't like, and several tropes, even outside Darth Wiki, are inherently negative. And if the subject is either "Team Doug", "comic book movie" or "right-wing work/person", the chances of tolerant positivity are slim to none. This behavior may be termed Happiness Is Mandatory in Trope lexicon but with mainstream parlance, it's better known as "Toxic Positivty".
  • The "No Recent Examples Please" rule added in 2019. Those for it state that many of the tropes that were added under it were frequent targets of misuse and edit wars, and that having this new rule would help organize and cleanup the examples. Others felt that the time limits that were added were too long a wait just to put down an example (Broken Base and Base Breaking Character were given a 6 month wait time) and that these new rules further limited what could be put on pages.
  • The complete dewicking of Internet Backdraft in mid-2019. Those for it state that Internet Backdraft had a long history of being misused for negative fan reaction because of the definition of it being so vague, and that negativity did not belong on TV Tropes. Those against it were upset that over thousands of entries were wiped away based on the consensus of about 20 tropers and pointed out that instead of putting valid entries in their proper YMMV tropes as was discussed, the tropers doing the cleanup simply nuked everything without even bothering to try.
  • Back in the site's older days, most tropes had a Troper Tales section where tropers could share funny little stories about those tropes happening in their day-to-day lives. However, it quickly became flooded with stories that tended to be either disgusting, bizzare, pretentious, blatant bullshit, or sometimes all at once, and after critical communities merciless tore into it, it was given the axe altogether. Those that remember them are of two minds: there are the optimists who think it had potential and deserves a second chance, while others feel that it's best left forgotten and unmourned, with the very concept being unsalvageable.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • While the site is American in origin, TVT has a lot of users from the United Kingdom. As such it's not uncommon to see British words like "rubbish" or "fogey", or an obscure reference to British pop culture, when browsing on one of their pages.
  • Still, there have been cases where American Tropers have Commonwealth English replaced by American English. Even in cases where the media in question is from the U.K.
• Memetic Mutation: The "Nuclear Ghandi" meme of the Civilization fandom was created as consequence of a false information inserted into the series' page by TV Tropes user Tunafish. It took years and Sid Meier himself negating the idea of a glitch making Ghandi hyper-agressive prior to the fifth game for the thing to be eventually negated, as the false information kept spreading thanks to Circular Reasoning: people kept linking to the wiki every time someone negated the information of the wiki was false, and users began to misremember Ghandi as aggressive. It did not help the developers had not seen the source code of the game in decades, so Meier only checked it when writing his own autobiography.
• Never Live It Down:
  • In general, TV Tropes' transition from a relaxed and casual atmosphere to a far more "professional" one is a sore spot for many an old fan. While most would agree that certain aspects of old troper culture such as Troper Tales did the site's reputation far more harm than good, scrubbing the website of any fun or personality in trope entries comes off as a major over-correction, leading not just to entries and pages feeling very clinical and robotic, but the website becoming its own antithesis by being just as stuffy and formal as Wikipedia. This may or may not be reflective of troubling general trends in fandom - wanting all of the prestige of being professional and legitimate, but with none of the actions, analysis and self-introspection that would be required to be "taken seriously".
  • Mostly because of Fast Eddie and Fighteer, the staff at TV Tropes have garnered a reputation for being strict, power-hungry, abusive people who will ban anyone for the most mild offenses — including not parroting their every opinion.
  • The forums have garnered a reputation for being an incredibly toxic place with incredibly toxic people, filled with biased opinions that will be shot down unless the mods happen to agree with them.
  • The Nightmare Fuel page for Ready Jet Go! was mocked off-site by places like 4chan since it was a show for kids on pre-school that had barely anything unnerving. TV Tropes eventually scrapped the page, but it's often brought up as an example of the site's users making anything slightly uncomfortable an example, or that they are so fragile that anything can be an example.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Owning to their erasure of their "Gushing Over Magical Girls" pages from their site due to not meeting their standards, the website's detractors started to point out their hypocrisy by referencing their inclusion of Cuties, A French film that is also came under (inextinguishable) fire since its release on Netflix. To be fair with TVT, many users on the site argued with cutting the page.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks:
  • The purge of Porn Tropes and nearly every NSFW work, a decision so controversial that This Very Wiki came into being partially because of it.
  • The June 2018 redesign, buggy at first, was criticized for its look and the security issues it created (some users were logged in as other accounts and could access email addresses).
  • The site's more restrictive rules implemented between 2018 and 2019, particularly with complaining and speculation, was met with criticism:
    • With complaining, time limits were implemented for certain YMMV tropes that had this the most, with 6 months being the most common limit placed. Many disliked this change, feeling that the limits placed were far too excessive a wait just to put down an example.
    • For speculation, new guidelines for non-released work pages were implemented. If works didn't meet the "minimum requirements" or attracted too much speculation, they would be locked until their release at best (which could take anywhere from a few months to a few years) or deleted and locked permanently at worst. This garnered complaints for restricting tropers on what works they were allowed to make pages for and for the definition of speculation depending on what the mods felt counted.
  • Trope name changes in general. Whether it's Spoony Bard becoming Quirky Bard or Holy Shit Quotient being gutted in favor of Shocking Moments, many users feel that it's just another example of the fun being sucked out of TV Tropes. Although to be fair, a lot trope names have since dated themselves and some of them are in-jokes from buffistas.org and Television without Pity forums. If you never visited these forums, then a lot of the jokes would fly over newer tropers heads. On a similar note, the decision to make some YMMV tropes, such as Dude, Not Funny and Ear Worm, only document in-universe examples of said YMMV tropes was seen by some long-time users as yet another sign that TV Tropes was becoming a shell of its former self.
  • Audience Reaction tropes Ensemble Darkhorse and The Scrappy have become a lot more restrictive than they once were. While there were problems with people trying to cram in characters they either personally liked or hated, it's yet another case of overcorrection leading to characters having to jump through serious hoops to qualify for either trope now.
  • In general, TV Tropes' transition from a relaxed and casual atmosphere to a far more "professional" one is a sore spot for many an old fan. While most would agree that certain aspects of old troper culture such as Troper Tales did the site's reputation far more harm than good, scrubbing the website of any fun or personality in trope entries comes off as a major over correction leading not just to entries and pages feeling very clinical and robotic, but the website becoming its own antithesis by being just as stuffy and formal as Wikipedia.
• Unfortunate Implications: For some, the site dewicking LGBT tropes such as Bi The Way and Badass Gay reeks of this, especially since more insulting LGBT tropes like All Gays Are Pedophiles and Depraved Homosexual are still around, coming across as being homophobic even if it's not the intention.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Given the wiki’s reliance on pop culture references and informal writing styles, it can be made very apparent when a certain entry or article was made. For example, something that was written in the early-to-mid 2010’s will likely contain plenty of references to My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Homestuck, and Frozen. The site has attempted to remedy this through the introduction of the "No Recent Examples" rule, though how effective it is (and whether or not it should even exist at all) is a whole other can of worms.
  • Once TV Tropes was named dropped often to show off their "media literacy". Over time, with two Google Adsense incidents, the changes in moderation and demographic expectations, and obtuse trope wiki jargon; the site has become a bit cringe for a site that claims to a be an authority in media resources.

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