Home

Welcome to Tropedia!

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

Wikimedia

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:


Commons – Media repository	MediaWiki – Wiki software development	Meta-Wiki – Coordination
Wikibooks – Textbooks	Wikidata – Knowledge base	Wikipedia – Encyclopedia
Wikiquote – Quotations	Wikisource – Sources	Wikispecies – Species
Wikiversity – Learning tools	Wikivoyage – Travel guide	Wiktionary – Dictionary

Featured Article

No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup

"Probably the last man who knew how it worked had been tortured to death years before. Or as soon as it was installed. Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent protection."

—Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

A specialized version of the Reset Button: Any dangerous device or technology owned by a villain (particularly a supervillain of the James Bond mode) which is not off-the-shelf exists in a metaphorical vacuum. There is only one of it, there are no plans or schematics for it, no earlier generations of development exist (in the case of expensive and rushed projects, the final project might have been made with the cannibalized parts of the prototype, or might actually be the prototype after a whole lot of upgrades and patches), and (for dangerous computer programs) no backup copies anywhere. Thus the hero may safely blow it up, blast it with EMP or otherwise render it useless, confident that no one can recreate the technology -- or worse, just take version 0.9 out of storage and use that the moment he leaves.

Fan Community Discord

Visit Discord here.

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