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Comments
I like the inanity of it. It's like...a slice-of-life wiki. You can just chill and look up tropes for no real reason.
It does analysis in between the plot dumps and stock device cataloguing. Commentary on the gender politics of certain tropes, simplified narratology, UsefulNotes pages, etc.
I fear that analysis through the lens of TVT articles would turn into those Zelda & Philosophy/South Park & Philosophy books where the medium is merely used as an illustration for stock philosophies as opposed to using the content of the medium itself as a starting point.
Ach, correct. Binged on too much Freudian media analysis last night.
About the fanwank: that doesn't differ too much from what I fear-fans wanting to make the work look profound and deep leading to everyone-is-jesus-in-purgatory antics.
" Writers who actually use it as a resource are going to end up writing awful, cliched stuff, because you don't write by stringing together patterns that appear in lots of other people's work. You try to create interesting characters and make them do interesting things. "
That doesn't stop it from being useful in moderation, sometimes. You just have to use it correctly.
And you don't really use it to help you write. You use it to see how other people did something, and thinking, "hm, how would I do that?". Or something like that. I really have no clue how to explain this...
^^Which reminds me of the issue I have with the Crowning Moment tropes, primarily [Crowning] Moment of Awesome. Such a thing more often than not rewards flash and immediate gratification while ignoring context. People that post there apparently think that someone punching another person in the face qualifies as a crowning moment even if there's no good reason for it.
In addition, Awesome Music is pointless as a trope. It's a glorified recommendation list, especially since people will put anything from their favourite media on there.
Maybe. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the would-be writers who post there just literally string together the tropes.
And they should also be honest enough to say "a resource for amateur writers" or something, because I seriously doubt Philip Roth or Charlie Kaufman or Alan Moore are ever going to read TV Tropes for some fresh plot ideas. Actually, it's quite funny imagining their reaction if someone suggested that to them...
> Not really, no. They're hardly helpful when you need to start your own observations on a film. And if anything, wikipedia is better because they at least manage to point out thematical approach in some of the articles. Something that TvT doesn't wanna do and has no interest in doing.
I'm going to have to disagree with y'all pretty strongly here.
I never said that TV Tropes was a how-to guide for analyzing, understand, or creating fiction or other creative work. If you're treating it as such, it's a very, very poor guide.
It's just a tool. It's a very useful tool. Trope pages provide commentary on trope, reference related tropes (and typically also comment on those relations), and provide a list of examples (which should ideally all have explanations attached to them, explained in ways that are understandable to laypersons who have not seen/read/heard the example in context). (Yeah, that last bit needs a lot of work. So? Let's get to work.)
Yeah, sure, you can complain that, say, the examples aren't compared, nor are good examples separated from bad ones. Well, that's for you to figure out, as a work creator! For example, you can pick out examples that are or aren't like the instance in your head or the needs of your story, and from those that are, you can get preliminary ideas for how to build your own story/characters/setting/etc..
You get to see how other people did stuff. That does NOT mean you should be copying off of them. In fact, if you're trying to build a story by simply selecting some array of random or related tropes, then you're an idiot, and if you actually try writing such a story you'll most likely end up with a pastiche of random junk thrown together. If you're creating a story, you should always start with a premise for your storytelling, and only then look at the TVT wiki to get inspiration to fill the holes as you flesh out your setting and story. In short, TV Tropes is a useful tool, not an instant story machine.
If you're looking to analyze a work or a trope, again TV Tropes is a useful tool, but not an instant analysis machine. TVT is more like an evidence room, where you can look at instances of, descriptions of, and sometimes interpretations of stuff; you're the police detective who's supposed to be the one to connect the dots and put two and two together. Now, if you want to make an analysis website, go right ahead, but, to my understanding, that is not what TVT is. The site, as I understand it, is about cataloguing things.
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> Except that people are only interested in saying something happened. Most of the time, there's little investigation into why the producers used the tropes the way they did.
I am trying to change this. Incidentally, this is why I praised how MostCommonSuperpower became limited to the western superhero genre.
I am hoping that trope definitions move away from "existence" as a condition for presence and involve "intent" or "function" more. You'll still have some tropes where intent is hard to differentiate from mere existence, but I'm working on it, and I hope others agree with me that things like "meganekko" shouldn't just be "all animé girls who wear glasses, ever".
(Incidentally, it's a possibility that that and related "existence tropes", such as zettai ryouiki (or however that's spelled), should just be relegated to fan-speak. It definitely has a place in the wiki, but not necessarily as tropes.)
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> there used to be a line in the homepage about "analysing fiction".
Well, people on TVT definitely DO analyze stuff. It's not necessarily in a very formal, sit-down-meeting way, but there's definitely analysis in the community.
What seems to be the issue here is whether that analysis gets organized and posted on the website for others to easily find and read.
> It does analysis in between the plot dumps and stock device cataloguing. Commentary on the gender politics of certain tropes, simplified narratology, UsefulNotes pages, etc.
See? @InsanityAddict agrees with me.
Not to mention that there's often some implicit analysis in trope descriptions themselves, which often talk about how the trope has been used.
I'm not sure Wikipedia does that better either. Wikipedia is definitely better for finding out facts about the production (such as who worked on it, what year it was published/released, etc.) but other than that Wikipedia is also pretty spotty.
And Wikipedia's role really is not to offer analysis. As much as you can complain that TVT doesn't offer analysis, at least it tries--Wikipedia doesn't even bother trying.
Personally, I see the entry pimping to be a sort of necessary suck that will actually pave the way for more interesting analysis of works.
Which is a problem. No solution will satisfy everybody.
that Wikipedia does analysis, but not by its own editors, but via
quoting what academics and critics have to say and presenting it in a
readable fashion via links to jargon.
What about for modern works, or for works whose interpretation is not notable enough to be included in Wikipedia?
There's still a niche to be filled there.
The fact that TVT is documenting a preliminary "analysis" by counting tropes represented in such works is a start.
> Mostly biased towards a writer's preferences without any arguments (The aforementioned fanwank)
I agree that this is a problem; while some tropes can be immediately obvious, a lot of more subtle concepts really need explanations for examples.
> When it comes to tropes, it's basically "A trope can be used as X or Y.
Sometimes even Z". Which I find both vague and, most importantly, just
plain unnecessary as the example section below should easily explain how
the trope can be used in different ways. Not to mention that most uses
of literary conventions are or aim to be different unless there's an
intention of intertextuality involved.
Not necessarily; such a statement is often used to clarify intent and indicate trends about how a trope is used, and it's more useful than diving into an examples list and counting up instances by hand.
> The example lists are....problematic, to say the least. the problem is
that entry pimping does not necessarily lead to more variety of works
being brought to the forefront. If anything, it just means niche works (Such as Homestuck and Touhou) are brought up constantly.
That's a great reason for folder-sorting examples lists, as well as alphabetizing them by source.
> But the inherent bias in the Crowning moment of whatever pages, as well
as the examples of nightmare fuel and memetic mutation make it clear
that TvT is written by fanboys first and foremost.
I totally agree with shoving these off into side-projects; if anything these should be spun off into related wikis anyway.
> I honestly can't see how this site can be a tool for writers. I mean,
for starters, for all the articles on things like "show don't tell",
there is still a significant lack of writer advice out in the wiki, like
"cohesion and meaning" as well as "thematical approach" which are
things that should be in a writer's mind instead of stuff of "Is my
character a jerk with a heart of gold?". There's a reason why someone
uses a certain kind of character in a story. And it's more than just
simply "I like writing this kind of character". And that's something
that I feel that TvT implicilty encourages when it breaks down
everything and it doesn't show you or tell you why did these authors use
these particular tropes here. It comes across as "They used them
because they're inherently good or appealing archetypes".
This is exactly what I was addressing when I said that TV Tropes isn't an "instant story machine" or even a how-to guide. It's just a tool. It's like, I can give you a screwdriver and some screws, but you'll have to know on your own that you should not be plunging those screws into drywall without a plastic expander, for example.
> While I can see intent, I don't see why trends are there. I mean, it'd
be easier to document and understand trends via examples of how said
trends work, no?
Yes, but where are you going to put the trends you conclude from the examples? In the article top, of course.
> Admittedly, it being in the article is fine and dandy, but let's
face it, most of the time it comes across as vague and constant
diggressing, rather than an actually concise article
Not sure what you mean by this. I'm talking about a trope description containing information about how the trope might be commonly used, and why. That doesn't seem to be digressing at all.
> (Which reminds me: I think that the example lists
should be organized chronologically and by medium, rather than just
"Order in which they were added, with priority on the works the editors
are crazy for, these days)
> My point is simply that it's not like TvT is any better than Wikipedia just because they focus on Homestuck instead of Ulysses.
I once tried chronological order for a music article, but realized that that would be a huge barrier to contribution or a headache for moderation/monitors because people would have to dig up dates of production/publication/release in order to put things in order.
My point of alphabetizing was to say that it's easier to gloss over text you don't want to read, such as craptons of Homestuck or Touhou references.
> I'm not expecting TvT to give me the secret to how to tell stories.
That'd be dumb. But I'd expect a site based on fiction to, you know,
actually address how you write fiction, not by telling me how to, but by
telling me the basics.
Point taken. That said, I don't think that was the original mission of the site anyway. It would be a very useful addition, yes.
> "show don't tell"
This really does not apply to a wiki anyway, whose whole purpose is to tell, to describe and enumerate. As for the technique "show don't tell", yeah, that should be changed to a "good things to do when writing a story", but then again, this wiki is more about cataloguing tropes than compiling guidelines for good writing.
complicated if you're gonna be anything close to through (Hell, let's
say that the editors completely forget about any works before 1990. You
have any idea of how many trends that would cover? Or hell, even a year
alone, if we're more imaginative)
I didn't mean go into great detail about trends. I meant, for example, putting on the "meganekko" page the point that such characters are often meek and humble and studious and are given glasses to suggest this. Some very basic information like this.
> That's admittedly a big disadvantage, but I definetly think the
benefits are worth the effort involved. Besides, all you would need is
the date when the work was released, which can be solved with this
magical thing called google.
Region releases on different dates, works of unknown or disputed authorship, serial start versus particular serial chapter versus full novel publication date, internet phenomena with hazy beginnings, etc.
Subcategorization by genre would be more effective than that, in my opinion.
> But it still means that other works (Both niche and otherwise) are neglected.
And that's where people like myself, who contribute work pages for obscure things like Barnyard Blast, Beat Angel Escalayer, and Bruce Lee My Brother, come in.
> It's the nature of a wiki to be subject to the trends of its time. But I
think that editing other pages should be encouraged (Something akin to a
list of "pages in need of wiki magic" in the front page would work
excellently, I think)
For this, I would recommend some sort of reward system. For example, there could be rewards for participating productively in repair shop discussions, for helping to do wick checks or remove natter or move pages to appropriate namespaces or something. Of course, such rewards would have to be necessarily rather minimal in order to prevent people from engaging in corruption in order to gain them, but still, this is a start.
> Not to mention that you and the other editors for any of those works
won't exactly manage to completely bring said works to the foreground
due to the staggering number of people who are not on your side and are
editing millions and millions of other works.
I was just mentioning this for the purpose of coverage, not the purpose of popularizing.
> Not like it matters much, as memes barely count as fiction and are, if anything, products of fiction.
I was thinking about creative work in general, since TVT doesn't just deal with fiction. There are news broadcast tropes, music theory tropes, and more.
> I honestly think it should just be a matter of using the homepage for something beyond it being an intro to TvT.
Don't know what you mean by this.
But it shouldn't have been done like this in the first place. Limit everyone to one page of avatars, and then produce a rewards system that gets people extra pages, at least.
> Internet phenomena with hazy beginnings and news broadcasts, music
theory don't sound like connected concepts at all. Care to elaborate.
I mean that the scope of TV Tropes's creative work coverage goes beyond just fiction.
> As I've mentioned before, we could simply put stuff like latest edits,
created trope, work pages and pages in need of wiki magic and so on. You
know, let both editors and new users know how they could contribute
towards making the wiki a more complete...thing, i guess.
Ah, I see. Yeah, that's probably a good idea.
But I never look at the home page anyway, except to use it to go somewhere else, or getting there by accident.
"But it shouldn't have been done like this in the first place. Limit everyone to one page of avatars, and then produce a rewards system that gets people extra pages, at least."
The thing is that it doesn't matter how many avatars you have in your gallery. Only one shows up at a time. But then again, I never understood the obsession.
time-sinker and to me it feels silly to pretend otherwise.
I completely agree with that, but... No, for the sake of avoiding unnecessary drama, I just stop here.