I notice a lot of hostility towards tropes on this board. Why?

I notice a lot of hostility towards tropes on this board. Why?

Who doesn't love to see the Big Damn Heroes beat a Xanatos Gambit with a Crowning Moment of Awesome that they did Thirty Five Minutes Ago?

Tropes are the building blocks of stories - trying to subvert or avoid them won't magically make you a genius.

Other urls found in this thread:

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MortonsFork
youtube.com/watch?v=HJ2iR1Eq0RA
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding
youtube.com/watch?v=9C4uTEEOJlM
twitter.com/AnonBabble

seems like people just dislike tvtropes site
dunno why, maybe because of its visitors

Thumbnail looked like a penis.

I like TVTropes. Fun reading.

They're a bit up their own arses but yeah I've spent hours there reading shit

It's more that some people dislike the website, which made up pretty much all of those names anyway.
I'm not entirely surprised; the informal nature sometimes lends to people to using literally every trope they can even halfway justify for literally any story they can find without ever thinking too hard about it.

Like the "Badass" trope for instance.
I'm pretty sure they have applied "Badass" to literally every single character in any media ever at this point, rendering the first half phrase itself pretty much as meaningful as the word "Freedom" was during the Bush Administration, which is to say totally meaningless.
When the website was newer there was a bit more self-control about stuff like that, but now it's more about trying to cram as many tropes as you can even halfway apply to something like it's some sort of game you can win for your favorite anime and mangas and shit like that, and their pages are ALWAYS the worst ones too.

Also, nice taste in comics OP.
The Metal Men are fucking boss.

Also, tropers are effectively what we like to think redditors are like.
they're overly enthusiastic and optimistic about their hobbies
they're pleb as fuck
they think that having "weird hobbies" is cute and special
they lack insight in everything
they rehash old memes forever
they think that they're part of some intellectual elite because they repeat what they've heard on discovery channel.

A lot of which also applies to Veeky Forums more than to other boards.

So it's understandable that those here who aren't complete dumbasses would want to avoid being likened to tropers.

I admire TvTropes' dedication to autistically categorizing everything. It pleases me greatly.

because tropes are inherently bad.

reusing the same schtick over and over is just bad writing.

Because they named the trope of a villain having multiple victory conditions, a storytelling device that has probably been around since before written language, after a villain from fucking Gargoyles.

>tropes
People dislike it because its once again leftyshit that clueless hipsters try to turn into a social science just like"'Deconstruction".

neo-postmodernism is cancer.

No.
I guarantee you literally every piece of media you have ever likes or enjoyed has elements or entire plots lifted from previous stories and sources that inspired the original creation.
You are not part of a super special generation of people who enjoys new and interesting things different from all that has came before.
You aren't special in any way at ALL as a point of fact, and everything we have ever made comes from somewhere else because it comes from the imagination and minds of human beings who are influenced by stories and things they liked that were made before them.
They are not "bad" things, just ideas that can be used poorly or without finesse by less talented writers and creators.
One of the things I notice that TV Tropes tends to do is that by quantifying and trying to explain these vague narrative concepts it convince more of these less talented writers and creators that if they too include these things that pieces of media they liked had in them they their own creations would be equally awesome because it filled the by-the-numbers list of things they saw in TV Tropes. Unfortunately this doesn't actually improve your writing skills the same way a color-by-numbers piece of art doesn't do much to improve your painting and artistic skills.

So the problem isn't with ideas, because ideas have no substance. The problem is that by nature most forms of media are complete shit because most creators are not very good, hence why he value exceptional ones so highly.
TV Tropes just makes it easier for the shittier writers to write the shit they probably already would have, which is actually helpful in identifying poor writing for future reference in a "do not do what he did here" way.

It's just a site. I don't get the hate for it, and sometimes having specific terms for things can be helpful.

Because he embodied the trope perfectly...

They listed the whiteout screen from Pokemon on the Nightmare Fuel index at one point, too.

this

These guys have the right idea. It doesn't help that the people on the site are some of the most dysfunctional human beings on the planet.

How does that look like a penis?

Because the intention was to create language which could be used to talk about media, but like we can see from your post, the actual practice is replacing discussions with buzzword bingo.

creating terms to categorise things is a sign of our intellect.

without ways of classifying, describing and labelling, all that remains is anarchy

Man is a database animal.

>itt: no one remembers that tvtropes went pants on head retarded

The hate is deserved

>One of the things I notice that TV Tropes tends to do is that by quantifying and trying to explain these vague narrative concepts it convince more of these less talented writers and creators that if they too include these things that pieces of media they liked had in them they their own creations would be equally awesome because it filled the by-the-numbers list of things they saw in TV Tropes. Unfortunately this doesn't actually improve your writing skills the same way a color-by-numbers piece of art doesn't do much to improve your painting and artistic skills.

I have seen people who tried to improve their stories by "putting all the tropes in", but they appeared to be either trolls or somewhere on the deep end of the autistic spectrum (or both). TVTropes wasn't the reason for their stories being terrible - that would have happened anyway.

Are you referring to the "no more adult tropes" thing (which they were forced into, even if some of the staff got overzealous about it), to the recent change of management and site redesign, or to something else?

>TVTropes wasn't the reason for their stories being terrible - that would have happened anyway.

Agreed, which is why I have no problem with the website itself.
The problem was that type of person now seems to be the exclusive type of person found in the site.

People who have no understanding of literature or storytelling, and whose taste in media does not extend beyond shitty anime, should not be trusted to make a categorization system for tropes

[citation fucking needed]

Not the whole thing. But it looks like there's a penis where a penis would usually be on a humanoid being.

>Autism speaks, the post.

>creating terms to categorise things is a sign of our intellect.

Leftyspeak: The Post

I didn't know that Carl von Linné was a leftist.

Invoking tropes invokes the tropes website which is full of autists and therefore is scorned by Veeky Forums

Kex.

...

Arguably, this Troper is probably the youngest of which who suffers from this Trope. This is practically the invisible label that’s under the invisible Berserk Button of this 13-year old kid. He broke 33 pencils in his life, and had a good friend break two of those pencils because they were too hard. He even yelled at someone because that guy was the third person who asked if he could be punched for the third time, with a teacher only a mile ahead!

Describe your favourite RPG without using labels. Go ahead, show me this world where you don't categorise things.

>trying to subvert or avoid them won't magically make you a genius
Unfortunately, there's a large chunk of Veeky Forums that believes doing the opposite of what makes sense means you're being original.

I just wish the site had more content control. There are so many shitty articles. And a lot of genuinely common tropes aren't documented very well.

It's good reading about the things that make up your favorite movie/show/game/etc, but yeah, the community is 100% cancer.

Does anyone have the troper tales pics? Those were a goldmine of cringe.

This is also true.

I was about to explain my opinion, but it looks like you've got it for me. Thanks.

The only trope that should be referenced by name is TV Tropes will Ruin Your Vocabulary.

TV Tropes talks about story elements that people have been talking about for as long as there's been human culture. There already exists a rich vocabulary for talking about stories, one that your intended audience will be able to understand. TV Tropes instead introduces a private language of obscure references that nobody outside of a vanishingly small internet bubble will understand. They practice the opposite of communication.

And furthermore, even if you do get the references, they give too much credit to their namesakes and not enough credit to the things they're being compared to. Jonathan Frakes' character on Gargoyles is not the Platonic ideal of a character making a plan, and the only people who think he is need to get their heads out of the Disney Afternoon of their own assholes.

>Aristotle invented Leftyspeak

Mostly, it's hate of popularity. When people started liking TVTropes, Veeky Forums felt compelled to hate it.

It's also a fundamental misunderstanding of story structure, the idea that boiling down stories to common elements means that no-one is original and that this is somehow a NEW thing. It isn't. Archetypal literary criticism, structuralism, this all pre-dates TVTropes by literal decades.

He was swedish.

fuck him up socrates

About 75% of the time, Tvtropes doesn't even understand the trope it's trying to categorize; hell, a good amount of tropes are actually named for something that doesn't actually invoke the fucking trope.

>Since this thread is apparently about TVTropes instead of the use of tropes...
I like the whole Jungian bullshit about repeated patterns and Heroes Journey and all that, so I like the concept of tropes. I also like the website TVTropes for creating a dictionary of references to point to when discussing tropes, which I'm frankly surprised hadn't been done before.
I hate that if I even mention "it's a trope where..." about things like "The Final Girl" or "The MacGuffin", that existed loooong before the TVTropes website, I get some jackass getting triggered and telling me they hate tropes and generally something about autismos and how TVTropes is bad.
Not even for mentioning *a TVTropes trope*, just the concept of tropes in general.
It's like trying to explain the themes of Metal Gear Solid 2 and having the person you're talking to start going on about how memes are stupid and they hate them and going "le" and mentioning epic fails and lol.

>Literary discussion is leftyshit
Okay. So is pretending to be an elf.

I feel like the argument that TVTropes is bad because it identifies tropes is sort of silly. They existed before they were crowdsourced into an overgrown Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom wiki. People even used tropes intentionally before TVTropes. One of the most successful franchises of all time was made by liberally ripping off cool shit the creator liked as a kid. Tarantino made it an art style.

TVtropes is indeed rather entertaining to read on a day where you have nothing better to do, and even if they are a bit arrogant, I can't say I haven't learned a lot from them, and have discovered some neat new things from their many links.

The worst thing about the community is that even the slightest criticism of a work in a page is viewed as being bashing. Presumably a bunch of lickspittles got butthurt about the work whose boots they lick getting criticized, complained to the moderators and the mods folded like a deck of cards.

>Taxonomy is for leftists
>Literature is for leftists
>Jargon is for leftists
>Political parties are for leftists
>Cartography is for leftists
>Literally every discipline that requires a specific glossary is for leftists
>You, using the term "Leftyspeak", and the format "[Topic]: The [Thing]", are for leftists
>The very concept of language is for leftists
Well, I guess reality does have a well known liberal bias, after all...

But a lot of them don't have a good term for them. That's sort of the problem. Hell, like says, a lot of common things aren't documented well, and that extends outside of TVTropes.
Worth noting is that recently they've started making the references less obscure and begun naming their tropes in a more obvious way. Frankly, I'm surprised Xanatos Gambit wasn't renamed (I just checked). I guess it's one of those things that at this point is too well known. Also, needs more articles like this
tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MortonsFork
I feel informed and intrigued by this piece of tax history. I only kept reading because the article quote promised incest and murder.

But beyond that, *knowing* who Xanatos is doesn't really matter. Having a term *like* "Xanatos Gambit" is what matters. You don't need to know that the earliest examples killed with knives to know what a "slasher" is when talking about a movie about a guy who kills people with a baseball bat or accidents.

This thread reminds me that I got to Veeky Forums from TVTropes. I'd jumped ship to 7chan early, but when I got into RPGs, their Veeky Forums board was one of the slowest. I was reading TVTropes and came across the DC 80 Escape artist thread and was reminded that Veeky Forums had a roleplaying games board.

Sounds like the lefties are on to something.

Remember of course that language is a constructed set of artificial signifiers used to lend a sense of order and structure to the signifieds we experience

Their concept of reducing everything into rigid inescapable categories stifles creativity. Also talking to them feels like I'm talking to a combo of Gene Shallot and one of those meme-spouting, schizo nerd girl robotically expelling lines from Portal and Firefly.

Yes and TV tropes has gone from assisting that process to obfuscating it.

Who is Gene Shallot?

>Who doesn't love to see the Big Damn Heroes beat a Xanatos Gambit with a Crowning Moment of Awesome that they did Thirty Five Minutes Ago?

I like cliches and tropes, but that still made me cringe badly.

Unlike us, right?

I meant to write Gene Shalit.

Jargon in general tends to have that effect until you finally grasp it. Try learning a new discipline, like 3D modeling or sculpting or cooking. You'll be neck deep in terms you don't understand.

I can't draw. Pretend I drew Gene Shalit as an onion.

I’m going to offer an alternative theory.

Because roleplaying games, at their heart, are about telling stories. Telling stories, not talking about stories. Character backgrounds, settings, NPC motivations, the adventures themselves, all of these exist as hooks from which a story can be hung, or even strung together. We want to hear about the time an immortal luchadore caught a flying wyvern in a submission hold an dropped the both of them in a volcano, or the time the players completely circumvented a trap just to circle back and set it off in their own faces because they wanted to know what it did, or about the time that the party’s bullshit artist started a cult after the mad scientist’s pet monster got loose and staked out a territory.

I mean, sure, Sturgeon’s Law applies and most of it is crap or so painfully derivative that we’ll deride you for it, but Veeky Forums always wants to hear a story.

Tropes aren’t stories. I mean, look at the second line of your post. That could have been a cool moment full of tension and drama, sure, but after you stripped all the identifiers, motives, characters, and stakes out of it … what’s left? “A Thing Happened”?

Tropes might be building blocks, but treating them like lego pieces that you can connect together pell-mell and hope to accidentally stumble your way into genius doesn’t work either. Kind of like legos, you might have something in the shape of a house, but it won’t serve its function except in the most basic of ways.

As for why Veeky Forums gets annoyed with it in particular? We’ve all known that guy whose character concept begins and ends at “Elf Ranger”

>I notice a lot of hostility towards tropes on this board. Why?
Tropes are ideas.
Veeky Forums hates ideas.
Because/tg/ is a hivemind.
...wait

Tropes are stereotypes.

Who knows, maybe that one guy Likes 'The Epic of Gilgamesh' and absolutely nothing else.

Crowning Moment of Awesome isn't even a trope, it's a subjective term. I'm not complaining about standards, I mean it's not even classified as a trope on the site.
"Who doesn't love a Crowning Moment of Awesome" is a tautology. If you don't love it, then by definition it's not a CMoA.

Also, how can the heroes jump in right in the nick of time to save everyone if the plan was already foiled and no one needs saving?

This is truth.

It comes across as antagonistic and hyperbolic, but I can't find anything wrong with it.
There's probably a trope for that.

Well it's good to see there's at least one person left who isn't buying in to delusions here.

>Telling stories, not talking about stories.
First off, telling a story is aided by understanding stories that exist. Even Citizen Kane required Orson Welles to understand story structure and the medium he was working in, so that he could radically redefine the conventions of that medium.
But more than that, telling a story and talking about stories are in no way mutually exclusive, or Veeky Forums as a board wouldn't even exist.

Boiling the OP's intentionally disingenuous, especially when your own examples can also be called "a thing happened".
>Who doesn't love to see the ragtag band of heroic adventurers stop a plot that benefits the villain no matter the outcome with an over the top moment that cements how cool they are, all planned out so that the fight was a distraction?

>We’ve all known that guy whose character concept begins and ends at “Elf Ranger”
I feel like if we're going with the hypothetical Troper, their concept would inherently have a lot more jargon. Elf Ranger with a Heart of Gold who's Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds or something.
>I swear they had a character/plot generator
>They changed their stupid site layout
>Can't find it
aaaaaa why can't every site on the internet stay exactly the same as it was when I last went there six months ago. I don't want to do mental effort.

Tropes does not really give an understanding of story structure.

If a gene is the basic unit of life, and a meme is the basic unit of information, a trope is the base unit of a story.

I thought it was gene, meme, scene

Sure it does. It can give you an idea of how overused a cliché is.

Gene, meme, scene, sense, peace, race, revenge

I wouldn't say cliche. Tropes aren't cliches, and it's impossible to NOT use tropes, just as it's impossible to not use memes or genes.

Mostly because using Official TVTropes Titles in All Capital Letters makes you look like a smug asshole showing off how you're in a secret club, which is in fact just a public wiki.

Referencing tropes is fine. Using TVTropes names for them makes you look like you think TVTropes invented tropes.

A trope becomes a cliché when it loses all meaning/effect.

You can always make something new from scratch. The real effort is making it presentable, compelling or even functional.

a trope IS a cliche.

That's why tropes are bad, because they are cliches.

This, really. When I was in high school I browsed the site all the time and loved it. But now, whenever I see someone talking in Tropespeak it just looks grating. You don't look like any kind of intellectual when you talk about how your Big Bad is Genre Savvy and never says No One Could Have Survived That. Tropes as they exist on the site were obviously meant to be retroactively applied to works. You're not supposed to base characters and storylines off of checklists of your favorite ones.

I got into the site shortly before a certain cartoon about colorful equines hit the internet, and it all got swamped with that shit. Then, fan fiction started getting dedicated tabs and even sub pages for Trope discussions. It soon became really clear the site's community only really cared about discussing retarded fan theories and their OTPs. So basically, it became a giant collective tumblr blog about cartoons and fan works instead of a place to discuss media in any meaningful way.

If I ever have to resort to the wiki name, I often say "For lack of a better term" because making shit up on the spot is even worse.

You know what its like trying to make a story out of tropes?

Its like taking every worn out, dated, tired cliche in the book of jewish comedy writing and mashing them all together without any understanding of plot, story structure, character dialogue or narrative.

You want to know why your writing is shit? Because you spend all day regurgitating tropes instead of actually trying to learn how to write a proper story with a compelling narrative.

A cliché is only bad if the presentation is bad. Just like that post you just made and keep making more of, just like a bad cliché.

The terms are stupid and cringy.

They encourage thinking about narratives as piecewise construction rather than individual strings of events and causation

It also tries to legitimize cliches.

You only know about tropes as presented by TV Tropes, don't you?

Something is cliche when the presentation is hackneyed.

>They encourage thinking about narratives as piecewise construction rather than individual strings of events and causation

This is my biggest problem with the way tropes are presented. You should never write your work around what Tropes (as in a capital T) you like or don't like.

youtube.com/watch?v=HJ2iR1Eq0RA

you lot are the spergs even the other uncool kids avoided in high school.

I honestly feel like this is you guys projecting, and "using terms from a secret club that's actually public" is kind of like... the definition of anonymous imageboard culture in the first place. People don't use jargon to be cool and show off their shibboleth, they do it because *having terminology makes conversation about a subject much easier*.
For example, this is why "tumblr" has all those "made up" gender and sexuality terms.
This is why scientists use shared systems of terminology
This is why even outside of TVTropes, tropes are a thing.
This is why academic critiques tend to use a lot of the same phrases
This is why idioms and shibboleth and shared cultural concepts develop in the first place

Now, you CAN argue that using the technology of language to codify a concept creates its own set of problems, like creating a barrier to entry, or shaping the conversation itself. These are very valid criticisms. Linguistic determinism is a thing. There's actually discussion in scientific fields if certain languages are better for scientists because of how those languages work. If you've ever read Uncleftish Beholding, the rewrite of Atomic Theory to be in a hypothetical Germanized English ("Anglish"), you can see how "Waterstuff" might be easier to grok than "Hydrogen"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding

But "language shapes thought" is a much different argument than "they're using obscure terms, that must mean they're elitist pricks". Which is especially ironic on a board about elfgames, since we wouldn't be able to talk about those elfgames without terms that make a muggle's head spin.

By the way, me using terms like "grok" and "muggle"? Kind of examples. A lot better to use small words that people are likely to understand as opposed to spelling out that I mean "understand and make sense of without much difficulty" and "a person who hasn't been indoctrinated into our subculture".

Jesus I love Star Wars just as much as anyone else but bickering over whether or not Sheev's death blew up the Death Star is a whole new level of autism.

Remember when discussing this shit amounted to little more than the moral implications of private contractors working on the Death Star?

All that shit you see in youtube videos like that or the This Troper ones was banned years ago. Arguing inside an article is no longer allowed, everything's supposed to read as if it was written by the same person, and the whole "community" side of the page was deleted and confined to the forums proper.

Also, their wordcount on Doug Walker's pages eclipses the combined works of Shakespeare.

Except that they actually are just using terms bexause its a part of their favored lexicon, and not because of any practical utility those terms have. The vast majority of their diction is not meaningfuly useful or even shorter or easier to say than normal words for that which they are trying to describe.

I'm sorry pal, I don't know what to tell you. The image stuck, and anybody that refers or even makes allusion to tropes here gets painted with the same brush. It's better to avoid the word as a whole if you want something resembling rational discussion.

See I'd be inclined to agree with you, but TVTropes uses very unique jargon.

The names they use which are simple and straight forward--like "Lancer" or "Big Bad"--are fine. Even Tropes like "The Scully" have a sort of logic behind their names.

But a lot of their Tropes are a string of winded, capitalized phrases which reference some dumb cartoon or comic book or brief moment in a Buffy episode. Or worse, some kind of joke the person who named it came up with. It is very difficult to follow when you have no idea what they even mean by this. Like if I see someone say their villain is a "Neidermeyer" when they mean some kind of sadist doctor, or "A Handful for an Eye" when they just mean fucking pocket sand, then it gets really old really fast.

I hate "big bad evil guy" because it doesn't actually confer any additional information over "main villain", "primary antagonist" or any other number of ways to say the same fucking thing without sounding like a middle schooler

I've always wondered, is there such a thing as a serious tv tropes? A page with easily available, thorough information on literary analysis presented in a cohesive manner?

You know what it's like trying to write a story without tropes?
Nothing, because you literally fucking can't. Posts like this boil my blood, because it's so obvious that is true for you.

I feel like this is such a stupid argument, although I'll admit that I'm overreacting because of the previously mentioned boiled blood. Understanding these things isn't some negative. That's why Joseph Campbell's work is seen as so influential, and a must for writers. There is also nothing wrong with writing a story based around the things you like. The Star Wars movies that people actually like were basically the 70s version of someone using TVTropes, since Lucas intentionally followed Campbell's guide. Also he took liberally from the things he loved as a kid, like Kurosawa films and movies about WWII.

>You will never get these 3 minutes back
Eh. I'm already on Veeky Forums
>Well ACKSHULLY, in the Expanded Universe...
I don't mind nerds arguing about minutiae (although that one guy is right; there doesn't have to be a causal link in the first place), but man, when Star Wars EU is brought up I can't help but cringe.

884,647 words?

Did you just... not get anything I said, or what?
The fact that a Trope (capital T) is less than summing up a complex thought (the article) every time you want to talk about something is already incredibly useful. It's why it's useful to say "Bob" instead of "My uncle with the long hair who plays guitar and likes pokemon and only dates hipster chicks" every time you want to talk about Bob. Try to have a conversation about a person without using a name. That right there is the only utility a Trope needs.
By summing up complex concepts in only a few words, you can more easily discuss something.

BBEG is our word. Theirs is "Big Bad". Which is simpler to say, though I still prefer "antagonist".

The problem is when you start using "My uncle with the long hair who plays guitar and likes pokemon and only dates hipster chicks" as if it was a literary archetype and call all such characters The Uncle Bob

You can use a cliché to great effect. What makes it bad is how its implimented. Lots of people love clichés and stereotypes. So that means it can't be bad by default.

"Lancer" is an odd example, as it's pretty fucking opaque. What about that term implies "The #2 guy"/"the alternative to the main hero on the team"? You'd have to go into some weird "lances are a less-common heroic weapon than swords" tangent for it to start making any sense. It's not remotely intuitive in casual conversation.

That's all of Veeky Forums. So that includes you too. Otherwise you wouldn't be here.

youtube.com/watch?v=9C4uTEEOJlM

Thing though with "Lancer" is it just sounds cool, so people are more willing to use it if you define it right. All you really need to say is "yeah, the Han Solo character is what's called a Lancer". And they'll immediately get what you're talking about.

I agree with you, and they've been trying to change a lot of their trope titles to be less specific (like I said, I'm surprised Xanatos Gambit isn't changed, but I guess some titles are too iconic). Although just to point out some irony, "Pocket Sand" is exactly what you're bitching about. I don't watch King of the Hill, so if that wasn't a meme, I wouldn't know that "pocket sand" meant "throwing sand or something else in someone's eyes during a fight". In that regard, "A Handful for an Eye" is a lot more explanatory.

Doesn't need to.

That's not a problem. That is literally what I just listed as a positive. Names are fucking useful for talking about shit.
If there's a trend of long haired guitar playing pokemon loving hipster dating uncles named Bob, that's a fucking literary archetype. It helps to give that archetype a name.

That is literally what Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell were doing. They just weren't crowdsourcing teenagers on the internet.

As I keep trying to point out, the trope names don't really matter. That they ARE names is useful. Just like I don't need to know whichever science fiction book "grok" comes from. Heinlein?
Just like 13 year olds don't need to know why it's called "dialing" a phone, or why the music their phone plays is a "ring"tone.

>Just like I don't need to know whichever science fiction book "grok" comes from

I've never encountered anyone--even here--who throws around the word "grok" like it's supposed to mean something.

Also pocket sand is a much more intuitive name for what it is than some oh-so-clever play on a common saying.