Tropedia

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Tropedia
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About The Tropedia

Tropedia is a community-edited wiki website dedicated to discussing Creators, Works, and Tropes -- the people, projects and patterns of creative writing in all kinds of entertainment: television, literature, movies, video games, and more.

Tropes are tools of the trade for writers; They are devices and conventions that we the audience expect to see again and again. Whether tropes are cliche or just standard for the genre is largely a matter of writing quality and personal opinion. But tropes will always exist, as they often reflect life -- and we exist to document them, play with them, and generally have fun with them.

The name Tropedia is a portmanteau of "trope" and "encyclopedia". We want to encourage creative thought, discuss new works, and welcome everyone to play around. This is not Wikipedia, this is a site for fans. The wiki used to be called All The Tropes, but behind-the-scenes drama in 2021 forced us to change the name.

We hope to educate and entertain -- to be both informal and informative. And we hope that you'll join us.

So read, edit, have fun, and play nice!

On Use of Wikimedia Content

We are fierce advocates of the free content reuse policy of Wikimedia Foundation and our site license and reuse policy was modeled on their own because we want to share our content with the world, and don't believe it should be hoarded or used to make a profit (except as CC-BY-SA allows), because like the WMF, we believe knowledge should be free, and since you can reuse WMF content here (with proper attribution), please check out the following WMF wikis for anything you might wish to use for pages here:

Featured Article

Watsonian Versus Doylist

There are no inconsistencies in the Discworld books; occasionally, however, there are alternate pasts.
Terry Pratchett on alt.fan.pratchett, wearing his Watsonian hat.


Maybe [the Patrician in The Colour of Magic] was Vetinari, but written by a more stupid writer?
Terry Pratchett on alt.fan.pratchett, wearing his Doylist hat.


Watsonian or in-universe commentary takes the reality of a work as given, and thus restricts itself to making statements that are sensible within that reality. Watsonian explanations are things like "Character X was lying", "He had plastic surgery over the summer", and "The main character fell off a cliff". A more precise technical term for this is intradiegetic.

Doylist or out-of-universe commentary considers the work as a created object, and prefers explanations based on the real-world motivations or circumstances of the creators. Doylist explanations are things like "The author had a Better Idea", "The actor died, so they had to hire a new one", and "The author got sick of writing those books, so he killed off the main character". A technical term for this is extradiegetic.

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We have more than just Trope And Works pages, below are the other major sections of the wiki:
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