Why I hate TV Tropes
Fri, 01/07/2011 - 17:14 — Peeta Mellark
Well, maybe "hate" is unfair. Or perhaps "TV Tropes" is, when the site isn't really the object of my wrath. If you're unfamiliar with it, TVTropes.org is a wiki where people can enter the "tropes" they've seen in movies, TV shows, comics, webcomics, books, operas, or in fevered dreams. And what is a trope? A convention, idea or device often used by writers. But--the front page assures you--they do not want clichés.
Right off the bat you may see the problem, as commonly used conventions, ideas and devices are at best clichés about to happen and at worst, well, clichéd.
But it's an interesting idea for a website and can be fun to spend some time on, looking around at stuff and finding all of the tropes associated with your favorite shows. No, the real issue I have is with what are deemed "Tropers." The obsessive, lifeless losers who seem to think reciting tropes somehow shows they "get" things, when in fact it shows the opposite.
Once on another message board somebody made a joke that I remarked on, as I found it funny. Woe be to me, however, as this was just the sort of opening one of the festering pustule Tropers needed to spew his puss. "That is an example of the 'Banana, Banana, Grenade trope,'" he said, or something equally stupid. And then gave a link that explained the joke. Because, yes, that is exactly what everybody wants to read. There is nothing funnier than a joke that's been explained in wiki format.
That's the quintessential example of the Troper. Normal users might read about some tropes, smile as they recognize other examples of them, and follow links to discover other shows or comics they might like. A Troper seems to believe his ability to recognize tropes somehow makes him into a literary theorist. It's like if someone walked into an art gallery and was able to name the colors used in the paintings. Are we supposed to be impressed? There's no insight, no depth, no actual understanding. All there is this is robot-like ability to slap labels on things.
But, oh, they want to share their stupid labels with you so, so badly. And that is why I hate them.
Comments
Secondly, I agree with you that the concept of defining and categorizing them seems weird to me. I think that one of the reasons TV has become such a huge part of our culture is that it was a quick way to create a common culture for a large, diverse country like the US. But part of the fun of that is that whatever references we all understand are just that...understanding amongst ourselves. We makes jokes about the "nosy next door neighbor" and we all know exactly the kind of character we're talking about. No one has to go look it up in a dictionary and see Gladys Kravitz's picture to understand. Or there's a plot where someone lies about knowing a celebrity, and a joke will be make about Bobby Brady and his dear family friend Joe Namath, and we'll all chuckle, cause we get it. It's not important or necessary to list every known example, it's just a touchpoint, and we laugh and tacitly acknowledge that we all know the cliche (yes, I said it), and we move on. It's not academia, it's television.
I like the concept of the site. For one thing, looking up a show like Dr Who shows just how much stuff they actually touch on over the years, and allows you to draw similarities. And some of the catagories are really, really fun. But I also like to have a reference for all sorts of tropes and cliches because one of the things I love in fiction is a beautifully inverted trope.
And yes, some people will blindly stick labels to everything they see and hear. But if someone gives you the definition of each key word in a story you are telling, that isn't the fault of the dictionaries. Like everything else, it is a great resource that isn't always properly used. Welcome to the internet.
Sarah, a trope can be a cliche, but not every trope is one. A trope is simply something that reoccurs throughout a genre. When it's used too much it becomes a cliche, but a lot of tropes exist at a lower level. They're recognizable, but not so overdone as to pass into the cliche zone. Affably evil villains are a good example of this. They're common and most people can think of a few examples of it, but a bad guy who is also polite and friendly isn't really a cliche.
My favourite trope is still the Thirty Xanatos Pileup though.
Figuring out what the trope names mean is, to me, about the only interesting thing about the site, and yet even that isn't done well. Often you have to read through a lengthy discourse on the trope to figure out the reference, which may not even be explained. Even when it is, it's usually an off-hand sentence that doesn't really explain anything unless you're familiar with the material.
That's a problem that runs throughout the site - the majority of the references, notes, etc. only make sense if you already know the material. So I gain nothing by comparing one "trope" to another unless I'm intimate with the details of both sources. For those sources I know, the mere mentioning of the trope doesn't yield anything of value to me. As already said, this isn't useful criticism, it's just a catalog.
Yet, as a catalog, it's not that great either. It's poorly structured - while some tropes are well-defined as sub-tropes of others, all pages on the site appear the same. This leads to confusion over where to place an item. This is only made worse by the desire of some to split the tropes to ever smaller distinctions, to the point that they may only apply to a single case or even not at all. It seems that nearly every Examples section is half full of "subversions" and "inversions" and arguments that the trope is being wrongly applied.
While some of those could eventually be fixed, it's perhaps a good indicator of why an unstructured Wiki is not a good choice for a project like this - it will take quite a while before a meaningful catalog appears from the chaos. Even then, I still don't see why I'd want to spend time looking at it.
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