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Comments
Same. My ideals are very similar to Stribog's and I'm not offended at all.
While I agree that the direction in which the site is going is honestly a terrible one (P5 aside), I'm not sure that I'm quite as pessimistic as some about the idea of TVT being run by its user base. To the contrary, I think that such an arrangement would be greatly beneficial to the site. Sure, the inevitable further shift toward anime tropes would be irritating, but look at where the site is going now: Neither academic in approach or fun-focused, but hopelessly lukewarm and deprived of the sarcastic bite that made the site amusing in the first place. With the potential abolition of No Negativity by group vote, some of that quality, at least, could return.
Of course, any turn in an academic direction is going to be bad news given the format and perhaps the very presence of works and creator pages. The list-making fetish that drives the site, while fun to participate in, makes formal discussion and analysis absolutely impossible within the context of an article, and the presence of pages on individual works and creators in such an environment just encourages rampant fanboying—or, in the absence of negativity restrictions, free vitriol.
I would love to have a site based on the premise of actually cataloguing and analysing story devices divorced from the hinderances of the TVT model, but such a site would naturally have a more limited appeal, and getting it off the ground would be a bitch...
I've said the same thing before. If someone could actually pull that off, it would be pretty awesome, and I'd be very willing to contribute.
That doesn't negate my point in any shape or form. Just because any other site or all of the other sites have the same issue, it doesn't mean that TvT doesn't have that issue.
Under the caveat that it was relevant to media and the way common perceptions, ideas and motifs kept popping up in media.
But a lot of it was meaningless pandering towards the userbase's need of cataloguing this thing they totally noticed that was totally a trope which was actually just done by two shows.
Well, yeah, nobody's disagreeing. It's just that I and CU think that the site is nowhere near what the userbase seems to think it is. Which is why I don't mind it if it died and if it was reborn into something actually sensical and run by people who actually understand media rather than just some peeps who watched Joss Whedon's work and really really liked it.
Eh. The site is good enough to look at broad media-wide trends and some interesting ways of using certain tools, but it requires already knowing how to examine it instead of taking it entirely at face value as a checklist like people like to do. It's one of those sites that'll make a decent writer better and a bad one much worse.
I don't buy that it can make a decent writer better to any real degree. I mean, its deepest level of analysis is "this convention is a thing that exists."
Depends. It usually goes far enough to tell you how a selection of works use those conventions, some of which fiddle with it in interesting ways or take it in a different direction. It's something to be read more as a briefly expanded works-cited list and jumpoff point for research than an instruction book.
Actually, the Analysis page for Deconstruction is a pretty excellent summation of what a true literary deconstruction is, and there are several other pages of that ilk which are quite insightful and well-written.
But that very page is a fine microcosm of the problem: The main page defines "deconstruction" on completely different terms—semi-incorrect and misleading ones, at that—and lists any number of examples that have very little to do with what the analysis page or even the main description sets forth.
It's really just a mess of miscommunication.
The analysis pages are sometimes great, but they're completely outside the scope of the wiki's actual goals; they're only there as a compromise because some people want to do analysis, and it isn't allowed on the main wiki.
I am not really sure, but I think a lot of what would happen kind of depends on who would actually vote on those site proposals. If the votes were not publicized really well or were super frequent, I could see a pretty small group (probably forum users) still dominating things. Otherwise, I do not know what would happen since I feel uncomfortable generalizing about tropers as a whole, negatively or positively, when my experience has been mostly limited to the forum.
^^ I really don't understand why analysis isn't allowed on the main page, to be honest. It's more fun to read than a list...
^ You have a good point there.
^Because the wiki isn't about analysis. It's about making lists.
^ I mean, what is the actual justification? While I can understand the initial impetus behind list-making as an article creation thing—after all, something that happens twice isn't really much of a trope, is it?—I can't understand there being any sort of actual rule against analysis on the main page.
It most certainly is! Picking something apart is like playing a game of real-life Calvinball, but marginally more organised.
err what
I mean, analysis doesn't have rules but it doesn't mean it doesn't have to have logic to it.
also notice the apparently
I said "marginally more organised." But really, literary theorists are crazy.
But that's not a reason to have a rule.
If that's their for-serious reason, I'll need to find a hat to eat.
Soon, the edible hat business will be a-brewing
Depends on who you be reading, really.
Most of the good ones, like Eco and Borges don't seem to exactly on the crazy side when it comes to their actual analysis and critiques.
I am somewhat surprised that I haven't been mentioned in this thread yet.
I am also okay with TVT shutting down, though that has more to do with its current infamy than anything else.
^^ Ever heard of Roland Barthes' S/Z?
OK, I was being facetious and exaggerating greatly, but literary analysis is still fun.
^ I never thought of you as one of the "bad ones," Ed. You are certainly an odd fellow, but not unpleasantly or aggressively so.
Why so, Edmania? Sure, you might have been a bit weird, but you stood apart from everyone else at the same time (and were practically gone for most of the time). And, yeah, you weren't offensive or anything.
Anyways, maybe it's just because I tend to focus on video game stuff, but video game-related pages I see on TVT tend to be devoid of a lot of the wank, in my opinion. It probably has to do with the fact that more controversial stuff is shunted off to YMMV or discussion pages (or the Video Games subforum), and the actual trope pages tend to list game mechanics for the most part.
Er, well, if this topic is talking about recent-TVT only, rather than like "ever since SA started making a hobby out of insulting us", then yeah, I have nothing to do with it due to my relative lack of activity.
But I am one of those people that have socially rejected morals, which is pretty much one of the biggest things you can look at to consider someone bad.
Don't take this the wrong way Edmania, but had you not decided to come to this forum and stop posting at TvT I would have forgotten about you entirely. It's not about individual people, but how the userbase responds as a whole.
Regarding the original topic of the thread, nothing would happen. "Nothing" here not meaning "no changes", but rather, well, Nothing. A site like that would probably not be able to function in those circumstances.
Regarding the rest of the thread: Really, guys? It's been like two years already.
Two years? Sounds like a record *is shot*
Never too early or too late for a debate.
As somebody somewhere once said, you can never quit TV Tropes.
Also, this thread reminds me I'm still yet to get another username.
1. Looks like there continues to be debate over whether the site is for cataloguing, analysis, or aiding creativity. I think its main aim is cataloguing, its secondary aim is to spur analysis (it is just a tool, and a single tool does not get the job done), and it has a side-effect of aiding creativity but should not be used directly for this purpose.
2. A trope, I believe, is something in media that (1) different from how an equivalent thing would work in real life, or (2) a conceptual element that is important to a narrative.
3. I was actually hoping, as the politics geek that I am, for a discussion about things like voter mobilization and turnout, the rise of political parties and partisan affiliations, questions about how people would react to their voting decisions being public and being criticized, and stuff like that. Well, I should have seen these topics of discussion coming, but that doesn't mean they're bad. Carry on, please.
4.
Substitute "video game stuff" with "video games and anime and other stuff that's not exactly the most popular stuff", and you have pretty much me. I have pretty much never browsed the TVT forum for new threads to read and just go by my bookmarked threads. That said, I occasionally end up swept into high-drama threads.
However, from what I can tell in these high-drama threads, there just seems to be a lot of people on the internet...acting like people on the internet. People have lots of opinions, some people hold them strongly, some people express themselves badly, some people have no sense of shame or social unacceptability, and so forth. But it's about par for the course relative to what I'd expect of the internet, actually. Not substantially worse or better.
IJBM: two more years.