TVTropes is the IngSoc of Modern Literature

But "Huxleyian" is even less menacing than "Bradburyian"!

But I've got to admit, that's probably the best metaphor for the site I can come up with.

So... Exactly what is the problem? That Tvtropes encourages? Bad thinking? What?

I dont understand the point of this thread.

???

So its bad that people codified what they thought defined X? And that other people use it as well?

I guess we better stop the scientists from classifying things now. They arent giving a personal and original name to the species.(Reductio ad absurdum)

And for meta-irony: LineArk complains about how discussion of fiction devolves into "immediately cross-referencing to other settings"...by immediately cross-referencing a fictional setting, in a way that absurdly mis-characterizes the nature of any sort of actual problem to boot.

EDIT: Also, if we are going to play a game of references, Bradbury is clearly the way to go. The World State is an engineered organization; 451 is just the result of rampant pop culture. Unless there's a danger of TVTropers getting control of the government (hint: there isn't), 451 is a better metaphor.

I find the anti-trope viewpoint ridiculous. If we have to avoid using tropes, it will hurt communication.
For example: "Mary Sue" is trope, so I can not use it to describe "that obnoxious girl that everyone loves, is special and is always successful". So instead of using two words I have to use twelve to avoid a trope.
You can't have a working language without tropes.

As for the idea that it leads to crappy stories, well they did manage to write crap as well before TV Tropes was invented.

Who are you and what have you done to MJ12! Shouldn't you be celebrating TVtropes as some sort of technocratic triumph over squishy and subjective human emotions and writing?

I would also challenge you to write a story, a readable one as opposed to avant-garde material, that couldn't be squeezed into the monomyth mould. The fact that pretty much everything can be explained using the monomyth makes it fairly useless.

I celebrate technocratic triumphs over squishy and subjective humanity. Unfortunately TVTropes is like... Qlipphotic storywriting, the way it's used.

This too, yes. The monomyth is called that because it is so common and almost every story falls into its purview.

The problem is that a theory that explains everything explains nothing, how do you disprove the monomyth? How does it help you develop better stories? How does it help you understand the author or the text? Or for that matter how does it explain and defend itself, rather than flatly state that so and so is part of the monomyth.

Meh, I don't see it. Sure, the guy who looked down the list of tropes and decided his protagonist should be an AntiHero might be bad, but I'd argue he's still better than the guy who's convinced he's the first person ever to think of a character who does heroic things but is kind of a jerk about it.

By the way, why is it that the crappier a story is, and the worst the writing is, the more the audience loves it and make comments?

Well, my major problem, if any with TV Tropes is that it leads to moments like in the ST:TNG Episode "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra."

That is, it leads to some excessive jargon. It gets really opaque to someone unfamiliar with TVTropes.

The Misenchanted Sword by Lawrence Watt-Evans. The main character is a scout of no particular importance in the military of a fantasy empire that has been in continuous warfare with another empire for eight hundred years. He gets pressed into playing assassin after acquiring the titular weapon, kills people of slight importance on the other side but never really affects the grand scheme of things, and then watches the war end for reasons completely unconnected to him. Then, halfway through the book, he takes his sword and opens an inn in the depressed post-war economy and turns down every call to adventure for the next forty years and generally leads a happy life. Now, old and going blind, he seeks a way to die... bypassing the sword's immortality-without-eternal-youth curse.

A rather good fantasy novel... but one with no heros or villains or a man rising to the occasion.

It doesn't.

Unless it's in "So bad it's good/hilarious/etc. territory," it's probably getting attention for some other reason. People'll put up with a lot of bad if it has something they like.

Personally, I like TvTropes (read: I am addicted to it). It's a great place to discover new webcomics/mangas/books most of the time, thanks to how it catalogues what works have such-and-such trope in their pages. But, I do understand the dangers TvTropes presents.

I can see how useful it is; one can sum up complex ideas in a phrase or two. I do, however, understand the parallel to Newspeak. I just think it's useful when explaining a work to another person, but when someone is writing, I wouldn't really recommend it.

No, crappy stories are just as easy to write as ever. The only difference is how bad writers go about writing crappy stories. The Star Trek fanfiction magazines from the 1970s and 1980s weren't exactly literary gold that disappeared the moment people started talking in person online and communicating bad ideas instantly, the bad ideas simply got a lot more homogenous, and this continues the process. The words and numbers change, but the averages and ratios stay the same.

On a different note, a LOT of trope titles used as shorthand- macguffin, anti-hero, tsundere, unreliable narrator, shadow archetype, captain obvious, deus ex machina, chekhov's gun, retcon, techno babble, willing suspension of disbelief, love triangle, shaggy dog story, Heel/Face Turn and Face/Heel Turn (which derive from pro wrestling long before tvtropes), fanservice, deal with the devil, and so on... they're all phrases that predate the site, and in many cases predate the internet, and have been used in exactly the same shorthand sense to refer to the same or similar concepts for decades (except tsundere, which as far as I know only emerged on this side of the pacific in recent years, but did so independently of TVtropes, and the pro wrestling-derived ones, which are two decades at most). Is it damaging to independent thought? Perhaps, although I personally don't think so. But if that's true, literary analysis classes, writers, and fans have been laying the groundwork and doing much the same thing for a long, long time, and to blame TVTropes would be like blaming the latest lip-synching teen popstar for the overall decline in modern musical taste.

As an author literary theory is inherently stupid if it's not something the author was considering when he wrote it. The favorite tool of Tropers and Theorists alike it to ascribe deliberate intent to interpretation and pretend that it is canon, rather than (as both should be used) noting that such things can interpretively arise. Writing with the intentional use of TVTropes is no stupider than writing with the intentional use of Narrative Theory, assuming ones goal is not to create a metadialog with those sources.

Regardless an important point needs to be made regarding TVTropes: There is a huge separation between Tropers and people who cite TVTropes. Although the websites usefulness has steadily declined due to editorial fiat (and their desire to not have any tropes that provoke discussion on the trope page), the fact remains that there is a great deal of use in having specific definitions for complex terms. It makes it much easier to cite either an example or an idea, without having to spend paragraphs defining it and having the discussion instantly derail into quibbling over the details.

Common ground, or as you attempt to dismiss it "groupthink" is not a bad thing. Rather it is necessary if one wants to have any basis for a meaningful discussion. The problem with the idea of "groupthink" is that generally when someone uses it, it simply stands in for saying "Fuck you all I disagree, and you're stupid because you hold a viewpoint that's different from mine (but I'm right.)" The accusation of "groupthink" is the refuge of the hipster. Your idea being more obscure less widely accepted than whatever idea you've termed "groupthink" does not make it better.

It doesn't though. It makes it easier to write a certain variety of crappy story, but the over all rate at which awful stories are written has not increased beyond expected measures, and certainly not in some sort of massive upswing as a TVTrope Causation would require. Writers will write, and bad writers will write badly, regardless of their access to TVTropes.

Which inherently proves that this is not a new phenomenon. So thank you, Andy Rooney. Would you like to complain about how no one writes letters any more next?

I suppose economy of language must terrify you then?

I mean shouldn't conveying a shared concept in the fewest words be the goal of communicating a idea?

Thank you; I swear, some people take those kinds of things entirely too seriously. I'd like to fish-slap them through the internet.

TVTropes is merely the codification of elements used in stories. It's been done before, and the creation of a universal resource is a natural development. If people are using the same term for something, its only because they have a common frame of reference.

Sadly, like all things on the internet, it can be all too easy for people to reuse old ideas instead of shaping new concepts. This is not the fault of a single website, but the fact that people are lazy and prone to fads.

No, it isn't a new phenomenon. It was, however, a phenomenon that existed only in certain circles because you had to know about the monomyth and then callously create a story that fit everything, and those people doing it generally knew their stories were pretty bad. It's the recipe to make a Hollywood blockbuster, a moderately successful financially reliable book.

TVTropes means more people are doing this exact same thing, and the problem isn't 'awful writers will write badly', it's that awful writers both get a patina of legitimacy by people constantly gushing over this or that trope, the site's whole "no such thing as notability" guideline which lets them attention whore, and most importantly, it makes it easy to be extremely lazy and do a by-the-numbers story. It furthermore makes it easier to get stuck in that rut and never improve, because the writer never finds his or her voice.

Finding your voice and the method/style of writing in which you're most comfortable with, and the stories you like to tell and tell well, is something TVTropes does not make any easier, and something critical for becoming a competent or good writer from the depths of awfulness. Becoming a good writer is something TVTropes helps not an iota with, and it has become some sort of toxic meme in fanfiction, with everyone endlessly yammering about how AWESOME this site is and what tropes are AWESOME and describing characters in tropes instead of even putting in a modicum of effort at organic worldbuilding. Reducing the effort it takes to write an awful story without commensurately reducing the effort needed to write competently is not a good thing, no matter what people claim that bad things happened before it.

IN other words TVtropes should be used to codify certain plot or character archtypes. However, a writer who is setting out to NOT write a shitty story should NOT use Tvtropes to garner ideas and what to include. That is to say,

"I want to write a story. I will include X, Y, Z trope because XYZ are a good combination."

Instead it should not be an inherent inclusion of the tropes. Rather readers should be one to read and point out "This fic has examples of X, Y, Z"


That makes sense right?

To paraphrase the general strategy of movie studios, who have known about tropes and used them as building blocks to toss together movie scrips for decades, it all depends on if you want to make a story geared towards empty but emotional/financial profitability or artistic integrity. Indie films vs. cookie cutter action movies and romantic comedy chick flicks.

Want to make something with more substance than a bowl of jello? Stay away from the building blocks and write from scratch; the end results come out in the Cannes film festival and/or small independent theaters, gets four to five stars from Roger Ebert, and maybe makes back its budget. Want instant recognizability and a ready-made fan/customer base? Make it out of established and known components people are familiar with; the end result makes a lot of money and gets half a star from Roger Ebert. Replace "money" with "reviews/popularity" and you have the fanfic situation.

There is nothing new under the sun. So its a new field affected by it? So what? There's still Cannes and non-cookie-cutter movies being made. Did you really expect your pet field of human endeavor to be all or mostly art-driven with no greed-driven stuff? If so, you're an idealist, please apply those ideas to politics and you can probably make lots on the pundit circuit.

This is something I have to disagree with.

I don't know if I count as a 'good' writer or not. But I do know I've become much, much better by reading TVTropes.

In short, TVTropes is absolutely a source of knowledge for a writer. It's a source of knowledge about how other people write. It's about how other people decided whether it was appropriate to introduce a particular element and Lampshade it. It's about why popular culture seems to have a preference for certain weapon types over others and what your character's Weapon Of Choice tells the audience about them. It's about what people expect and how you can mess with those expectations - and about how messing with the expectations has worked out for others. It's about the moments that incur particularly strong emotions from the audience - about cataloguing the moments that people find Funny, Awesome, or Heartwarming.

And if people try to write fiction by just combining tropes? That's not new. Tropes appear after fiction, not before. Tropes don't appear until after writers/producers/whoever decided not to have the Designated Couple kiss until just before the end dozens of times. Not until Holding Hands has shown up as being significant across every medium. Not until Rei Ayanami Expy becomes so popular that TVTropes is forced to take notice.

So there you go. You've got the cause and effect reversed when it comes to the worst of fiction and you're ignoring the effects it can have on the best of it. If you have a catalogue of everything ever produced by writers of one kind or another along with the reactions of a large cross-section of what's most likely going to be your fanbase if you're writing for the Internet or the kinds of people who are regularly on the Internet, and you can't learn anything from it? Too bad.

And if you just think that categorizing things somehow cheapens them or makes them worse? The only trope I have for you is Measuring The Marigolds. The second section of the article.

Good day.

No. This is flat out wrong. You're seem to be putting for the idea that codification of a specific architecture is unique to that monomyth and tvtropes. THIS IS FALSE.

Despite what Campbell claims, the core reality at the heart of the Monomyth is nowhere near as mono or as mythic as he makes it sound. Genre is defined by architecture, and authors have always used that architecture to write their stories. Campbells monomyth might be the most shining example (and even the most widely applicable), but there are countless lesser monomythic architectures. Every Genre has always been plagued with inordinately formulaic stories. Noir Detective, Historical Fiction, Romance, Fantasy, Sci-fi, Space Opera. You really think that only people following the monomyth and tvtropes write formulaic things? Have you read popular fiction?

Yes. It's also the formula to make a moderately popular but bad fanfic. Which is why 90% of fanfics out there are just poor copies of earlier and better fanfics. Look at ZnT to see that in action. Or Naruto. Or Twilight.

None of this is new, and none of this is related to TVTropes. TVTropes is simply the latest in an infinite iteration. Maybe the site makes it a little easier, but you're pinning the writing worlds ills on a site that doesnt deserve it. The people who deserve scorn for bad writing are bad writers. Don't excuse them of the responsibility by saying "TVTropes Made Them Do It."

TVTropes doesn't make it harder either. A writer finds their voice by writing. The idea that people, especially in Fanfiction of all places, would ignore worldbuilding is older than the internet and far older than TVTropes popularity. TVTropes isn't a cancer. To use a gardening metaphor, TVTropes is a groundcover. It stupid, and it chokes out other plants. But the only thing its supplanted is the ground cover that was there before. And in time some other ground cover will grow and replace TVTropes and be just as monumentally stupid.

TVTropes hasn't actually made it easier to write poorly. Writing poorly is still a matter of effort. TVTropes may have made it easier to formulate the ideas for bad fanfiction, but ideas have never been scarce. It's always been people having or lacking the will to write, and that's something TVTropes cant change.

No you haven't. You've become a better writer by writing. TVTropes is like any other text on writing: useless. Writing is something you can only learn by doing. TVTropes might package it so that you feel it's what's made your writing better, but you'd have learned the same lessons without it.