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TV Tropes (Website)
Trope trope trope trope trope, HEY!
Hi there! Nice of you to drop by our own page! You didn't know we have a page? Well, we always had one!

Regular visitors here won't need to read the introduction. You know what to do.

If you're not a regular here, TV Tropes is a wiki documenting, in a fairly informal manner, the various conventions of fiction. Our full history can be found on our Timeline page.

Of course, like any sizable work, we've collected our own fair share of tropes. And remember, Trope-tan is watching you, tropers!

Now let's get editing!

TV Tropes Tropes:

    open/close all folders 

    Tropes A – B 
  • Accentuate the Negative:
  • Ad Dissonance: Ad of Win and Ad of Lose document the vast spectrum of the quality of ads on this wiki.
  • Alice and Bob: They are often used to demonstrate a trope. To list all the tropes that involve them would be too long; see their trope page for details.
  • Alien Geometries: The Inverted Trope example on PlayingWith.Mile Long Ship. How exactly do you get a ship whose length is a negative number?
  • Alliterative Name: TV Tropes.
  • Alt Text: This wiki does have Alt Text capabilities, in the form of the Pot Hole.
  • Ambiguous Syntax:
    • The wiki itself has a few, many of which are chronicled in "I Thought It Meant..." For example, a Serial-Killer Killer: A killer of serial killers, or a serial killer of killers? (Both, more often than not.)
    • An example rightly documented in Funny.TV Tropes:
      From the Peanuts Headscratchers page:
      Jesus, Lucy, Violet, and Patty are CRUEL to poor Charlie Brown! They expect him to get an over-commercialized tree, made of pink aluminum? Charlie brings back a tree that looks like one that would be next to the humble manger, and they all laugh at him! Even damned SNOOPY! Although it sets up a Crowning Moment Of Awesome with the "That's what Christmas is all about" speech, I just want to wring those three bitches' neck!!
      Is it bad that I read the start of this entry as a list of 4 names, rather than an expletive and 3 names?
      Jesus is laughing at Charlie Brown for having a great Christmas spirit! The irony!
      Nope. I did it, too. As did my parents, Ayn Rand and God.
      Your parents are Ayn Rand and God?
  • And That's Terrible:
  • Anthropomorphic Personification: Trope-tan is the personification of TV Tropes itself.
  • Appeal to Obscurity:
    • From the Genghis Khan page: After a long list of conquered nations, it reads, "Khwarezm? You've never heard of that country? Exactly."
    • Similarly Trivia.X's Vaporware entry consists of, "What Xbox port of X3: Reunion? Exactly."
  • Archive Trawl:
    • The random button can have this effect.
    • Arguably, the reason that this wiki is so addictive. One page will only get you for half an hour, but the 50 pages that are linked that you opened...
    • Think back (or look at your history, whichever is easier). Odds are your coming to this page was a result of this trope.
  • Arc Words: Technically, the entire wiki is made up of them. But among the most notable ones are "There Is No Such Thing as Notability", "Tropes Are Tools", and of course "a".
  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: You'll find some of this occasionally across this wiki, many of which are Potholed to the main page, including the name of the trope.
  • The Artifact:
    • The "deadpan" in Deadpan Snarker. Due to Trope Decay, a deadpan delivery is no longer part of the trope.
    • Back in its early days, TV Tropes used to run on PmWiki, but over the years the website's code was modified such that no PmWiki code remains, and all that is left is the word "pmwiki" in TV Tropes URLs.
  • Artifact Title:
    • It started with TV (Buffy the Vampire Slayer in particular). Nowadays it encompasses all media.
    • The Permanent Red Link Club was called that because all links that were listed there were doomed to be permanently red. Now that links show up as blue as long as an article of a given title exists in any namespace, several PRLC members, most commonly subpages and former Main namespace redirects, are actually blue.
  • Ascended Glitch: Secondary tropes for video examples. Originally, you were expected to upload multiple copies of a video if it fit multiple tropes, but some tropers noticed that there was nothing stopping them from adding tropes to the media sources section of a video, which would make it appear on multiple trope pages. This was initially frowned upon, and such videos had the extra tropes removed, but it was later changed so tropes (or any page in the Main namespace) are listed separately from media sources, and is now allowed.
  • Author Appeal: The whole point of this wiki. Tropers write about whatever they happen to be interested in.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: This wiki has a search toolbar for Firefox. While initially it seems like it would ruin your life even further and be great to edit articles, it's much faster to just use the search bar at the top of the page or just Google "TVTropes" rather than use the dropdown menu and enter it.
  • Beige Prose: The Laconic Wiki uses as few words as possible; in particular, the Laconic entries on Beige Prose and the Laconic Wiki itself.
  • Blatant Lies:
    • On most pages warning of unmarked spoilers, the majority of the spoilers are marked anyway. Subverted with other spoilers warnings tell you that there might be or will be spoilers, NOT unmark all of them.
    • This trope is most definitely not a popular pothole target for lies.
  • Bold Inflation: Repeatedly Used On This Very Wiki, especially in emotionally charged subpages like Awesome Moments or Nightmare Fuel. Articles that use Bold Inflation:
  • Bowdlerise: After The Second Google Incident, commands from the advertising that keeps the site afloat mandates that this wiki either eliminate trope pages for more sexually explicit works or find new (much less family friendly) sources of funding. A number of works the sexual explicitness of which is debatable (most prominently Lolita, which has since been restored, and It, which does feature underage copulation in one scene but otherwise contains little explicit sexual content) have been caught in the mass deletions. Many of the Sexual Harassment and Rape Tropes also presented problems, which resulted in less problematic trope names and a major cleanup effort.
  • Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: There's an example in the description of this trope on this wiki.
    "[K]nights have declined in popularity, but the Knight Errant is still around in full force — instead of knights, they are now often cowboys, samurai, or Samurai Cowboys."
  • Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick:
    • One would be a line that goes rather abruptly and disturbingly like this (fictional example): "Japan is well known for anime, J drama, J music, hard working people and so on. But this wasn't always so. It used to be a common act to disembowel people, eat dead babies and such." Go on, say you haven't seen an example like this before!
    • Alternately, on the above links: Main Entry, Quotes, Sugar Wiki, Wild Mass Guessing, invokedNightmare Fuel...
    • Also, from page to page, article-article-article-Caught with Your Pants Down-Cold-Blooded Torture...
  • Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • British Accents: This trope falls victim to itself, as many non-Brits confuse "British" with "English". Mention of the other three nationalities (Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish) prevents it from being a complete facepalm. Not to mention actually mistaking a Scotsman, Welshman, or Irishman for "English" can lead to... unpleasantness.
  • Butt-Monkey: Did you ever add an example to this very wiki that was already there? Nothing to be ashamed of, this can happen to the best (especially if it was filed under a different namespace than you would have defaulted it to). Did you shamefully revert the edit on the spot? Great, you saved the mods some work. (Beat) Did the Edit Protip say to check if the example is already there?

    Tropes C – D 

    Tropes E – G 
  • Early-Installment Weirdness:
    • This very wiki used to list normal, YMMV, Flame Bait and Trivia examples all together on work pages until mid-2010. After that there was a period of a few weeks where both YMMV and Flame Bait examples were completely banned from work pages and could only be listed on trope pages, but it quickly became obvious that this wasn't going to work out and resulted in the current format of separate YMMV (and later Trivia) pages, with Flame Bait examples staying restricted to the trope pages (and sometimes not even being allowed there either). We used to have Troper Tales on this site too, but we prefer not to talk about that.
    • There are a number of troper practices and memes that were once very common, but have since become rarer or even outright banned due to tightening standards. For instance, many trope pages would point out an example from a particularly old work, noting that it "makes this one of The Oldest Ones in the Book". This phrasing was once so common that later uses of it would simply Pot Hole the phrase "makes this..." (or similar) to The Oldest Ones in the Book, on the assumption that everyone would be familiar with what that "made this". Eventually the problem was solved by turning the page into an index of various time periods where tropes originated; with more pages to link to, it became less of a meme to link to them in general.
    • This Very Wiki's standards for what is a trope and what isn't have changed considerably from when the wiki was founded. Since the late 2010s, quite a lot of tropes have been disambiguated or otherwise declared to not be a trope after all, including "character has a specific sexuality or gender identity", "character uses a certain weapon", and the appearance of specific animals in works (usually under the "Everything Is Better With..." style of naming). To give you an idea of how different things used to be, in 2009, there were individual trope pages for specific eye colours (not even rare cases such as Supernatural Gold Eyes, but common eye colours). The wiki was also more relaxed about Real Life Troping during the early years, to the point where some tropes were even created for it.
    • Some early versions of TV Tropes pages had a lot more zero-context examples than they do now. One example of this is the page on The Simpsons; the old version of the page had several examples with zero context or only barely any context at all, while the current version of the page describes the trope examples with more depth.
    • Meanwhile, because of the sheer size of TVT as it goes further into the 21st century, it's possible and perhaps even not uncommon to find pages dedicated to older and less prominent works that still contain examples of several of the above issues - out of place YMMV tropes are uncommon due to an internal flagging system that indicates their presence, but are still not completely unknown; wild trivia tropes are somewhat more common, and contextless example entries can still pop up quite often on pages concerning media prior to 2010.
    • Work pages used to be filed under the Main/ namespace like trope pages, save for rare cases of works (usually adaptations) sharing names with pages that had the namespace occupied, until they were completely transplanted to media namespaces around 2012. You can still tell that an older work page used to have the Main/ namespace when certain subpages (usually YMMV and character sheets) are shown as being older than the main page. Same goes for some older disambig pages.
  • Epigraph: This wiki, far too many times.
  • Episode Finishes the Title: The So You Want To namespace.
  • Exact Words: On the page for Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, the description of the game says that it "features never-before-seen freedom", which it does indeed — there is no collision detection (in other words, you can go through any object except the ground), no angle detection (allowing you to drive vertically), and drive straight off the map.
  • Face Palm:
    • Some editors in this wiki tend to use this at times as a reaction... and Pothole it to the Face Palm page.
    • Previously in the wiki's history, if a certain show/video game/comic/etc. had its own Wall Banger or DMOS page, odds were an image of one of the characters facepalming would be the page image. Due to the Wall Banger pages being cut and the images on the DMOS pages being removed due to lack of informativity, this is no longer present.
  • Failure Is the Only Option: Anything listed on the Permanent Red Link Club is basically this. If a trope or page gets so misused, become a magnet for racial slurs and personal attacks, and the like; and the page cannot be fixed, the entire page (and in some occasions, the entire trope) will be deleted and is never to be used again. Forever.
  • False Reassurance: On the Wretched Hive page:
    Limerick has often been named Stab City. Though in recent years the number of stabbings has decreased, as gun crime has gone through the roof.
  • Fixing the Resource Scarcity: Tropes and works are nourished with Wicks. If a page has too few wicks, it might fall under Starvation, so an Entry Pimp is in order to help it thrive.
  • Forced Meme:
    • Occasionally someone tries to sneak his or her idea for a meme on to a page, sometimes going so far as to interfere with other entries to force them into the limelight.
    • Also occurs in the naming of tropes. It's a very real debate in the forums, from time to time, whether the purpose of this wiki includes promoting specific fan-speak terms so as to become recognized across all fandoms.
    • Following the same principle, occasionally it happens that the creator of some fan-work writes a trope page for their work themselves. This isn't bad on its own, but in some cases it is incredibly obvious that the page would not have been written if not for the creator's own ego.
  • The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Some page descriptions, such as Demonic Possession.
  • Funetik Aksent: Some tropes on this wiki are this, such as Vampire Vords and The Ahnold.
  • Fun with Acronyms:
  • Fun with Autocensors:
  • Fun with Palindromes:
    • Trope Report.
    • invokedIt's also noted on the Technology Marches On page that the lack of home stereo systems these days makes the ever popular palindrome "If I had a hi-fi" a somewhat dated palindrome.
  • Furry Reminder: The Just for Fun page for the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Show Within a Show Daring Do, from the PoV of hypothetical online ponies. Furry Reminders abound; for example, vegetation in the wilderness is filed under Food Porn.
  • Gaslighting: This can happen non-maliciously (or perhaps maliciously) when editing this wiki. You could write the outline of a paragraph at the top of the page, work on a different part of the document, and then come back to find the paragraph fleshed out by someone else, or even deleted without a trace.
  • Going Mobile: This wiki has mobile apps for the iPhone and the Android.
  • Gotta Catch Them All: This wiki itself is one of tropes and archetypes from both fiction and nonfictional sources, whose success will have an unknown significant meaning for the universe!
  • Grammar Nazi: Yes, if someone makes edits with egregiously bad grammar, it may be grounds for a suspension. That's fair, though, since the alternative is a wiki with sloppy English.
  • Gratuitous Animal Sidekick: Tropey the Wonder Dog.
  • Gratuitous Foreign Language: On the Trope Epitaph page, the "Here lies [X]" part is translated into non-English concepts' respective languages. For example, "Här ligger Stockholm Shnozzing", "Hic iacet Parvum Opus", and "Twinkle Toes Samurai ga koko ni nemuru".
  • Gratuitous Japanese: A lot less than previously, given a conscious effort since the site began to make trope names more accessible and obvious, however a number of tropes (e.g. Yandere) are still principally referred to by Japanese words for anime character stereotypes that simply don't make sense unless one is already immersed in the culture - either through lack of desire to change them, or simply because there's no better consensus term that's been agreed upon.
  • Gratuitous Latin: Can there be any reason besides this trope that the main page has a Latin version?
  • Great Big Book of Everything: This wiki strives to be one. Compared to The Other Wiki, it is still in its infant stages, but, as There Is No Such Thing as Notability, it's definitely catching up.
  • Guide Dang It!: It’s not uncommon for beginner tropers to think of a trope idea that probably exists but have no idea what it’s called. The fact that many trope names don’t hint at the general concept adds to the confusion.

    Tropes H – M 

    Tropes N – P 

    Tropes R – S 

    Tropes T – W 
    Tropes applying to troper-made images 
Complete Monster (also includes SoYouWantTo.Write A Complete Monster)
  • Elemental Weapon: Crägnuum uses a fiery whip that is barbed to flog his writer in the latter image.
  • Expressive Skull: The skull-headed Crägnuum can emote with his eye sockets and jaw: he sports a sadistic smile in the former image, an exasperated expression in the latter image, and a furious expression in his appearance on the Big Bad Ensemble page image.
  • Obviously Evil: These two images star Crägnuum Mundomarauder, a dark-colored cyborg skeleton with a Sickly Green Glow (in the former image), spiked shoulders with skulls impaled through them, and is depicted destroying planets and incinerating people with green fire in the former image and whipping a person with a fiery, barbed whip to force them to write in the latter.
  • Omnicidal Maniac: The former image shows Crägnuum immolating a planet and its inhabitants after having done the same to several other planets.
  • Person of Mass Destruction: Crägnuum is shown to be powerful enough to set entire planets ablaze in the former image.
  • Sadist: Crägnuum takes the incineration of innocents with a huge smile on his skeletal face in the former image.
  • Scary Teeth: Crägnuum's teeth are long and sharp, which is most apparent in his appearance on the Big Bad Ensemble page image.
  • SkeleBot 9000: Crägnuum Mundomarauder has a robotic body, but his head is an organic-looking skull encased in a jar.
  • Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: The latter image features Crägnuum whipping (or threatening to whip) someone to write many pages in stress.
  • Savage Spiked Weapons: In the latter image, the Omnicidal Maniac Crägnuum Mundomarauder is seen flogging his writer with a barbed whip that is also on fire.
  • Stripped to the Bone: In the former image, the victims of Crägnuum's fire have been reduced to charred skeletons.

Alternative Title(s): This Very Wiki, TV Tropes Wiki, Television Tropes And Idioms

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