Content
TV Tropes initially focused on the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and has since increased its scope to include thousands of other series, films, novels, plays, video games, anime, manga, comic strips and books, fan fiction, and other subjects, including Internet works such as Wikipedia, which is referred to in-wiki as "The Other Wiki". It has also used its informal style to describe topics such as science, philosophy, politics, and history under its Useful Notes section. TV Tropes does not have notability standards for the vast majority of its content, as it declares on the Main Page.
The site includes entries on various series and tropes. An article on a work includes a brief summary of the work in question along with a list of associated tropes. In addition to the tropes, most articles about a work also have a "Your Mileage May Vary" page with items that are deemed to be subjective. These items are not storytelling tropes, but usually audience reactions which have been defined and titled.
Trope pages are the inverse: after describing the trope itself, it lists the trope's appearance in various works of media. For example, the page of the well known trope "Jumping the Shark", the moment at which a series experiences a sharp decline in quality as in the notorious story point in Happy Days, contains a list of works that reference the phrase. This is an important distinction. TV Tropes not does apply the term to a show, that being a subjective opinion about the show, but cites uses of the phrase by the show. In this way the wiki is fully interconnected through the various connections made between works and their tropes.
Trope pages are generally created through a standardized launching system, known as "You Know, That Thing Where...", or YKTTW, in which other site members, who are referred to as "tropers", have the option of providing examples or suggesting refinements before launch. While going through "You Know, That Thing Where..." is not necessary to launch a trope, it is very strongly recommended in order to strengthen the trope as much as possible.
Considerable redesign of some aspects of content organization occurred in 2008, such as the introduction of namespaces, while 2009 saw the arrival of other languages, of which German is the most developed. In 2011, TV Tropes branched out into video production, and launched Echo Chamber, a web series about a TV Tropes vlogger explaining and demonstrating tropes.
According to economist Robin Hanson, an unanticipated side effect of reading TV Tropes is that some readers become jaded and cynical, " surprise almost entirely with recognition". This is referred to on the site as "TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life," referring to the inability to read books, watch films, etc. without identifying each trope as it occurs.
Read more about this topic: Troper
Famous quotes containing the word content:
“What is most original in a man’s nature is often that which is most desperate. Thus new systems are forced on the world by men who simply cannot bear the pain of living with what is. Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique. If Hitler had been born in Nazi Germany he wouldn’t have been content to enjoy the atmosphere.”
—Leonard Cohen (b. 1934)
“I would like you to understand completely, also emotionally, that I’m a political detainee and will be a political prisoner, that I have nothing now or in the future to be ashamed of in this situation. That, at bottom, I myself have in a certain sense asked for this detention and this sentence, because I’ve always refused to change my opinion, for which I would be willing to give my life and not just remain in prison. That therefore I can only be tranquil and content with myself.”
—Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937)
“I have sometimes seen women, who would have been sensible enough, if they would have been content not to be called women of sense—but by aiming at what they had not, they only proved absurd—for sense cannot be counterfeited.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)