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Complaints that TVT has too much content about animé/Homestuck/whatever
A quote from @Bee in a thread where someone else complained about how many animé images there are:
Because for a site supposedly dedicated to analyzing entertainment and art, that balance is skewed so, so far in favor of obscure anime that a very small fraction of the internet has even heard of (well, at least the half of it not local to said anime that will actually be familiar with the site). I mean really, Negima had to be split into eight different main pages, and almost every one of them is longer than the pages for rather more significant things. Fuck, the Negima Ship Tease page is about as long as those.
I've heard this complaint way too many times. So what if TVT has too much content about something you're not a fan of? As long as that content is meaningful, I see no reason at all it should be curtailed.
If your complaint is that the content ratio is too skewed, you are perfectly welcome to contribute pages upon pages of detailed analysis and character study of any work of your choosing. The problem here is not that there's too much content relating to certain works/fandoms; the problem is that there is too little content about certain other works/fandoms.
Comments
The problem comes when it's not meaningful and is just needlessly creepy.
And both make me feel like I should renounce anything even remotely geeky and read nothing but history/science texts and the Classics from now on. Is that the right course of action?
Don Zabu - I think the point is more that if you read nothing but young adult novels and watch nothing but anime, it's the cultural equivalent of only ever eating frozen pizza. I mean, you need a balance.
On the general point, I'd say that there needs to be some sort of filtering system to cut out the deeply obscure and nerdy stuff, as well as the works that are basically just porn. The problem with Tv Tropes is that they just won't make judgements, on people or fiction, for whatever reason.
A while ago, I was talking about Railgun (if you know what that is) and I realized one of the episodes had a reference to Casablanca, namely the quote "I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship" and NO ONE understood what I was talking about. There's nothing inherently wrong with more articles about the latest pop culture shows or whatever, but it is an indicator that maybe the users of that site are getting seriously small reference pools. You just can't help but think it wouldn't hurt them to try something else once in a while.
Do I sound elitist? I should hope not.
No, because you shouldn't feel uncomfortable about the TVT wiki being like this in the first place.
In my opinion, at least. I really don't mind the wiki having more coverage of My Little Pony than Little Women, in part because I understand that it's all run on user contributions anyway.
Okay, there's also the fact that I don't personally afford much more respect to classic lit and famous films and such than I do to modern works. (Alternatively, I try to afford to same critical respect and perspective to modern works as I do to classic works.) Popularity, meaningfulness, and quality are very much distinct from each other, even if they are related.
I've said a million times, I'll say it again. I'd rather the site be right about Harry Potter fanfiction than wrong about Citizen Kane.
^^Nah, you raise a valid point but I have no idea how I'm going to convince people so set in their ways and willfully ignorant to expand their horizons so fugghedaboudit.
Frozen pizza erryday? Don't forget a large part of the site's population is American and in college.
Because then it isn't a site about discussing media, it's a site about discussing anime and some other shows sometimes.
Not only that, but that assumes that the content's automatically meaningful when it isn't. It's just playing "Spot the bird" with media, rather than anything that actually analyses how media works or what it does in order to convey information.
I mean, this is a site preoccupied (supposedly) with media analysis and yet analysis is not encouraged, and almost implicitly discouraged by the simple fact that they decided to keep it all into a place where nobody sees it, a la troper tales
OK, then, try to write a page as big as homestuck's on your own about, say, The Jazz Artist. I dare you.
Well, knowing what "birds" are in a work is an important first step in knowing how they fit together and do what they do.
Yes, TV Tropes could use a good deal more actual analysis content. Though it's starting to get there, what with the trope relations system. I think the bigger problem is that there isn't yet a good way for people to actually discuss analysis. There's an Analysis namespace, but IIRC it's done as a simple comment thread system, and nowhere near as prominent as the "spot the bird" side of the site.
I can't even muster up more than a few tropes at a time for works that I've just finished experiencing, so, no, I couldn't do that myself. However, the crazy amount of material on some popular new works is the product not of one fan but of a large number of fans and a large amount of their time.
Will TVT suffer from having popularity myopia when you're going purely on a user-submitted content basis? Yes, that's inevitable. Is this a problem? That depends on what you think the site ought to be.
Well, yeah, that much is true, but if you don't know how they behave and how they work in the nvironment in which you're putting them on, it's just a silly little hobby and nothing actually meaningful.
The trope relations system is not particularly different from how articles often mention related tropes. It's a bit of making something overcomplicated when it doesn't need to be. I know the reasons why analysis can't be done in the main wiki and it's simply the fact that it doesn't ift as there are millions of different perspectives and methods of analysis, which means that the main page can't have them all and can't sound like just one editor as it's intended to do. However, just one person can posit theories and conjectures, I think
That's exactly my point, Glenn. It takes a great amount of collaboration and time to pull off the thing you're proposing, and it really helps that most nerds tend to dislike such things as naturalistic projects and instead dismiss them as Oscar Bait or True Art is X
And that's another problem right there. Nobody can agree on what TvT is or what it should be. The administration keeps going on back and forth between a "Catalogue" and a "writer's resource". While it'd be possible to be both, the way things are done suggests that it can't be done and it needs to change if those goals are to be reached at all.
I still think TVT is basically a fun, charming waste of time.
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Copypasta'd from another thread:
People who complain about the content of TV Tropes are kind of missing the point, I think. Entertainment and art are not necessarily the same thing. They aren't mutually exclusive, sure, but a lot of entertainment isn't really fine art in the strictest sense.
TV Tropes is about entertainment, not art. It's about pop culture, mainly nerd pop culture, so what's popular with nerds is what gets promoted the most. The site is mainly to be used as a sort of trivia site for people interested in popular media, not a site for detailed film/literature/whatever analysis. Criticizing TV Tropes for not focusing on more highbrow works is like criticizing People Magazine for its lack of insightful commentary on the modern world, you'd be fundamentally missing the point.
@Juan_Carlos: It's both a catalogue (of tropes) and a writer's resource (to see how these tropes are used). It already is both of these things, so I don't see why either is in dispute.
What you seem to be disputing is whether it's an analysis tool. I think it is, but in the sense that it's just a tool; it does not by itself provide analysis, but it gives us readers some material to help us reflect upon a work and its various aspects and devices of design.
As for saying how these little birds work, well, trope pages already usually describe how a trope is typically used. However, you really can't pigeonhole how a trope works, and we already have enough of a problem with n00b storywriters going off and trying to shoehorn tropes into a work. There is often no one true way of how to use a trope anyway.
because it fails at the second one and at this stage, the catalogue's expanding to a point where it doesn't seem to be a catalogue of tropes so much as a catalogue of things that have happened in three works and thus it's a trope. it's not about how writers approach tropes, it's not about how a writer can approach tropes and it's not about how these things started. And it doesn't go deeper and maintains a rather superficial look at media. Is this a good thing? Possibly. Maybe that's all TvT should be. But even if it's that, it should hint at depth, rather than pretend that said depth is either nonexistent or something only stuffy academics talk about
I don't think TvT's tools really help towards understanding a work and how it works as well as why it works, because it's too entrenched on being a description of the work itself and its plot, rather than the details surrounding it.
And even then, I don't dispute whether TvT's a analysis tool or not. I know it isn't. What bothers me is how aimless it is as a project and how utterly misguiding it is a writer's tool.
It's not about describing how the little birds work, but about understanding the environment in which they move and why they behave the way they do in those environments.
I've said a million times, I'll say it again. I'd rather the site be right about Harry Potter fanfiction than wrong about Citizen Kane.I've said a million times, I'll say it again. I'd rather the site be right about Harry Potter fanfiction than wrong about Citizen Kane.
Well then it's a good thing that it's right about neither
I would agree with this more if not for the fact that many of them have no interest in looking at anything past their comfort media.
It doesn't matter whether it's a common thing or not. It's still a flaw and something that a catalogue preoccupied with understanding media should try to avoid.
@Juan_Carlos: Read my post. TV Tropes is a catalog of popular media. Works of fine art are great and all, but they're not in the mainstream. Hell, they're not even things nerds like, they're generally enjoyed only by the people with the patience and intellectual capacity to truly understand them, and those people are few and far between.
I'm not saying this lack of recognition is a good thing, I'm just saying that TV Tropes is meant to reflect what people interested in media like. Most people prefer media that usually isn't considered "fine art."
Explain the bias towards underground works or so called "nerdy works", then.
Fairly sure, say, Black Swan is more mainstream than, say, Homestuck.
Again, stop reating "art" as this incredibly unapproachable thing that only intellectuals enjoy, it's not. Anyone can watch Citizen Kane and understand it just as easily as you can watch Transformers 2. In fact, I'd say that T2 is harder to understand than Kane
See, you're talking about two groups there. You're saying that tvt reflects what people with an interest in media like. But if that were true, there wouldn't be such a big bias towards certain mediums and instead there would be guidelines trying to encourage editing in different pages.
The problem is simply that the kids want the toybox to be more than a toybox. But they still just put toys in it.
With that said, it's not like I particularly care about this. It's just fun to pick apart the problems and pointing them out because you don't get to do that in TRS/Wiki Talk without idiots being idiots or Eddie being Eddie.
>The problem is simply that the kids want the toybox to be more than a toybox. But they still just put toys in it.
Oh I won't argue there. People need to stop viewing TV Tropes as anything than a goofy little pop culture database. I mean, if wasn't anime it'd be superhero comic books or romance novels or the Star Wars EU or something.
I have noticed that people's enjoyment of TV Tropes is generally inversely proportional to how seriously they take it.
Pretty much. Like, I don't mind if people go overboard over stuff like, say, Cowboy Bebop. But when things like that are absolutely eclipsed in favor of obsessively chronicling an obscure extended masturbatory fantasy of schoolgirls...I mean, what the fuck?
^^Puh-retty much.
Nah, even as a little fun catalogue, it's annoyingly smug.
Honestly, there isn't likely any way to fix TVT's overemphasis on certain things besides having enough people who actually want to write about whatever it is that's under-represented. Anything that the current user base have not been writing enough about, well, no amount of complaining is gonna make them start wrting about it, no? It's not as if users have any real reason to write anything on a wiki. They don't get paid or earn anything for whatever pages they write. It's not as if writing about one thing instead of another would somehow earn them anything.
INUH,
I have noticed that people's enjoyment of TV Tropes is generally inversely proportional to how seriously they take it.
You may be right about that. I definitely am not a fan of the heated arguments that pop up from time to time in TRS for example.
Still, I think some people have used a similar argument to defend stuff like Troper Tales, Fetish Fuel, and some of the more gratuitous fan service tropes (i.e., TV Tropes is just a fun wiki so we should be able to put any of that kind of stuff on it if we want to).
I guess I tend to think that even if the wiki is not some super serious resource, having stuff like Fetish Fuel can make things less fun.
The "wikigroaning" stuff also kind of confuses me similarly to what DonZabu alluded to about feeling somewhat guilty and uneducated.
Yeah, we don't have to be Wikipedia to not be obsessive creepers.