What would it be like if TV Tropes operated as a direct democracy?

Eelektross

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.

With the concept of TVT itself, this kind of thing was bound to happen. 

And I always felt that the no notability rule looked better on paper than it did in practice.

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. 

 I never denied that it had a massive idiot infestation. I just said that if the modbase (except for people like Morven) wasn't off its shit the infestation would be less pervasive.

JHM

^^^ Basically all of this.

^ I would argue that it's less the moderation base as people (or moderators) than it is the nature of the rules under which they operate. That being said, there are a few people there who really should not be forum moderators. Or administrators.

glennmagusharvey

And that primary reason for TVT being cataloguing is why I don't like people cutting works because they're dirty or pandering to bad tastes or something.

I wanted TVT to have relatively unbiased and trustworthy (or at least, consistently biased so I can easily correct for the bias) information on all works.  All works.  This includes the works of Shakespeare and Milton and Austen and Dostoyevsky, as well as Buffy and Avatar and LotR and Evangelion.  It also includes Twilight, Chick Tracts, The Birth of a Nation, and Kodomo no Jikan.

And I'd argue that one of the best uses of TVT is to find out the settings, themes, plot details, and such of a work, as well as its approximate critical/media-fandom reception, without directly coming in contact with it.  It's faster and saves time, and it's safer for dealing with controversial or badly-regarded works--so you can get an idea of it without saying you've actually seen it yourself.

Unfortunately, it seemed that a number of people, on multiple sides, were not prepared to deal with this in a formal manner...

 

Also, that side-effect of aiding creativity?  See, TVT shouldn't be used directly as a creative aid.  You should never say "oh, I'm going to come up with a story, let me see what tropes I can put into it!"  The tropes that occur should flow naturally from the setting and themes of the story; any time you directly ask what tropes you can insert to provide more detail is an indication that you need to think more about your setting and themes rather than asking what arbitrary things to shoehorn into your work.  If anything, putting too many tropes into a work violates the Law of Conservation of Detail on the "overdoing it" side.

In this vein, the Trope Overdosed thing and the random story pitch generator are actually really, really bad, and I'm surprised I've yet seen no one talk about them as such.

Alkthash

Well the story pitch generator is mostly thought if as a silly toy though, right?

JHM

^^ I guess that really reflects on the immaturity and division of the current user base.

To be honest, as much as the mere idea of things like Lotte no Omocha! even existing kind of repulses me—not surprises, admittedly, but repulses—I think that if one were to have a truly comprehensive overview of media and its tropes and trends, one would have to have articles on such things. The problem is that by having pages on such works open to anyone to edit with the only restrictions being on negativity and perhaps out-and-out work-un-safety, one basically gives an open invitation for prurience and, in addition, a tacit endorsement of the contents of the work. The user base of TVT is not only too immature and biased, but too large to ensure any kind of neutrality in either direction, so I think that eliminating those articles is really the only way to go.

^ That, too. I find that sort of thing amusing, but the idea of taking it truly seriously is a bit ludicrous to me, and I think that most of the people on TVT think the same way.

The ones that don't, however...

glennmagusharvey

Okay, I guess you're right, they're more of indicators of badness than bad influences themselves.

Still, the idea that stories are just made of tropes--the whole idea of tropes as "building blocks"--is a problem.

ClockworkUniverse

I thibk it's reasonable to call them building blocks. The problem comes when people throw down some bricks in a pile and call it a house.

glennmagusharvey

Well, not just throwing down any pile of bricks, but more so, laying bricks wherever it seems fitting at the moment, rather than first coming up with a blueprint.

Thinking of them as merely bricks in a structure often involves neglecting the emergent properties that come from their interactions--something that's neglected when thinking of the narrative media system as a mere set of "building blocks".

ClockworkUniverse

Perhaps chemistry would be a better metaphor.

vandro

Remember, genes are NOT blueprints. This means you can't, for example, insert "the genes for an elephant's trunk" into a giraffe and get a giraffe with a trunk. There are no genes for trunks. What you CAN do with genes is chemistry, since DNA codes for chemicals. For instance, we can in theory splice the native plants' talent for nitrogen fixation into a terran plant.

Felt fitting.

Stormtroper

@Last page: One thing. Analysis on the main page is not allowed not because it's not fun, but because getting people to agree on every page's analysis and fixing the inevitable flame wars that follow is not fun.

JHM

Pretty much everything that GMH has said about the problem of approaching story devices as building blocks jibes perfectly with my own feelings, and while I admittedly think that the mentality is less present on the TVT fora than one would believe—any attempt to create a "writing with tropes" thread in Writer's Block has been met with a choir of angry catcalls, my own included—it's still a problem with certain young aspiring writers first approaching the site with no previous background in reading about tropes or literary analysis. The impression should be, "Look at all these fascinating patterns; this makes me want to write a story," but all to often it's, "So this is where writers get their ideas from," which is at once an understandable error and a potentially fatal one.