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The failure and ridicule of TV Tropes

This is something festering in my mind for the past week or two; a blog post that can hardly be considered “hackery”. It’s really a shame that I’ve sidelined myself into blogging solely about British political minutae. I’ve got more things to blog about than just how awesome and cool Nick Clegg is.

I’m pretty sure we know what a wiki is: a community-edited resource of information, usually open to pretty much everyone (sometimes registration is required). TV Tropes is a wiki geared, obviously, to tropes (storytelling devices) in television. It’s not an accurate description, really; its remit has ballooned from television to all media, and some real life examples; and it’s not a good example of a wiki.

You see, creating a wiki requires that you open up a large part of how it’s run to a wider community, unlike a blog, which is controlled solely by the people who write the posts. And when people contribute to a wiki they want to see a return on their “investment”. This is the way Wikipedia went over the past ten years; gradually, Jimbo Wales has relinquished most of his power to pretty much all kinds of people: most policy discussion and implementation is done by the public, actions are taken by the administrators, complex dispute resolution by the Arbitration Committee, and sorting the legal and public side of it to the Foundation. This has served Wales well; even with little non-delegated power, he is still seen as the “head” of Wikipedia and his opinions carry a lot of weight; essentially, he is the Wikipedia equivalent of Queen Elizabeth II. In theory.

On TV Tropes, however, this is not the case. The main administrator and site owner, Fast Eddie, doesn’t seem to have got what a wiki is about. Wikis by their very nature have a very egalitarian, anarchic structure “on the ground”. Sure, the Wikimedia Foundation has a clear power structure, but that’s partially for legal reasons. TVTropes is mostly at a level that doesn’t need legal structures to keep it afloat. Anarchy on the web at its most, huh?

Not exactly. You see, Fast Eddie runs a tight ship on TV Tropes. As tight as Andrew Schlafly, infamous control freak at large owner of the far-right blog “trusworthy” wiki Conservapedia. It can be excused, to a point, by saying “well, he owns the site”. But as I’ve said, wikis need to have some sort of democracy, or at the very least, consultation with editors, to survive. FE doesn’t do this, though. He’s widely known by his administrative fiat decisions which seem to go relatively uncriticised by the editors. Sure, getting rid of things such as the Fetish Fuel index was the best thing for the site, but where Jimbo Wales would use his reserve powers in an emergency, Eddie has more active powers, to the point of an absolute monarchy of the type seen in pre-Revolutionary France.

Fast Eddie also locks pages that he sees as “troll magnets”, but the criteria aren’t really defined properly. The result is permanently static pages because he just forgets about them. Contrast with Wikipedia, which says that permanent full protection is a last resort only. The moderators have a warped sense of priorities too. When I came across the Troper Tales page for Rape as Comedy and tried to get it deleted, I encountered significant resistance despite the obvious inherent problem with the page.

And, of course, the piece de resistance: the great subjective trope cull. Now, I’m no fan of pages on TV Tropes that are unduly positive or negative, but the cull on these tropes really goes too far. Wikipedia has the right idea when it comes to neutrality: present facts, and present the facts of opinions, but try to find a balance between those opinions. But we can’t even say if a work is good or bad, even if most people believe it’s bad, because it’ll somehow upset the people who think it’s good. Now, when it’s something like a recent Hollywood film, the chances are that there are a sizeable amount of people in that second column. But surely we can make judgements like saying that the Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man was completely terrible, can’t we? I mean, a game that was partially responsible for the Great Video Game Crash of 1983?

Wrong. Apparently, saying that is “subjective”. And herein lies the problem with TV Tropes. Opinions about a work don’t exist completely outside the work itself. Take a look at the film Lady in the Water, where the character of a obnoxious film critic was M. Night Shyamalan’s response to critics who lambasted The Village. Or, indeed, television series where unpopular characters are written out because the people hate them: Nikki and Paulo from Lost, for example. In all works other than one-and-done works, critical reception is essential for furthering a work. And indeed, there is a trope for characters such as Nikki and Paulo: it’s called “The Poochie“, after the fictional dog from the industry-mocking Simpsons episode “The Itchy and Scratchy Shoe“. Luckily, it’s not a subjective trope, yet.

But it doesn’t stop there. One of the most overreaching and stupid policies of the site is the whole “if you can’t say anything nice” guideline that pervades even writing. This, however, makes for incomplete coverage. To explain why, say, Seltzer and Friedberg aren’t making spoof movies any more, we have to explain that Disaster Movie and Vampires Suck were bad and they bombed at the box office. To explain why Rob Reiner fell from an award-winning producer of The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, and This is Spinal Tap to the joke seen in the South Park episode “Butt Out“, we have to look at North, and why the film was so bad Roger Ebert famously said “I hated hated hated this movie”. But none of this matters there. The problem is so endemic that real-life examples of a “People’s Republic of Tyranny” was deleted for being “rude”.

Which brings me onto another short point: Fast Eddie has encouraged the removal of real life sections because it doesn’t fit the remit of the site. But any evaluation of real life exposes this argument as bare. People use tropes all the time: for example, the “suspiciously specific denial” gets used in politics: for example, “I’m not being racist, but”, followed by a racist remark, or as I pointed out six weeks ago, “a fair impartial debate” between two people of one viewpoint. Tropes can easily describe Real Life too: take the example of the Orwellian Editor, which, like most of Nineteen Eighty-Four, was a not so veiled slight at Josef Stalin, the undisputed king of that kind of censorship.

And finally, the otaku nature of the community. No greater example can be found than the Nakama page. Nakama is, as the page describes, a Japanese word for a close-knit group of friends or characters. So why use “Nakama” rather than the alternate titles of “Fellowship”, “Comrades”, “Coterie”, or even “Ohana” (which, as any person growing up at the turn of the millenium, knows means “family, and family means no-one gets left behind or forgotten“)? Well, it’s solely because of an outrage by anime loving tropers when an attempt to move it to a more helpful title happened. This smarts particularly when some tropes named after western media (e.g. “Encyclopedia Browned” to “Conviction by Counterfactual Clue”) got changed for being “obscure” and “confusing”. And, as people have come to expect of the otaku, they tend to be socially stunted shut-ins who try to hide behind fake diagnoses of mental illness, which, of course, belittles genuine suffers. But I digress.

There is a point to Fast Eddie’s changes: it’s to increase the reputation of the site. But the damage has been done. From a control freak administrator to missing the entire mission of the wiki (and not as Fast Eddie repeatedly changes it) multiple times, and its userbase, making small changes like a ghettoising “subjective tropes” is all full of sound and fury that signifies nothing. Reputational change will only come when the site treats itself seriously, instead of the clusterfuck it currently is.

58 replies on “The failure and ridicule of TV Tropes”

As someone who used to visit and contribute (as a normal editor, not a mod or anything like that), I’d like to point out that this didn’t actually start until around mid-2010 or so…however, yes, it did indeed become as bad as you say, if not worse, and it’s one of the reasons I gave up and left in November, never to return.

I tried giving criticisms for Final Fantasy 9 and they banned me, because apparently when it comes to the Final Fantasy series (or several other things I can name) they act like certain games are “acceptable targets” for trolling and insults but others are “sacrosanct and perfect” that you aren’t allowed to say any criticism on, regardless of how valid it is, which they will just lazily hand wave away.

To be honest, I can still enjoy some of the pages on the site, but it has lost the plot from what it intended to do, but personally, I don’t see why they should care about reputation at this point, because no amount of edits will change anyone’s mind.

Hello,

I’ve been a troper for a years, and I discovered this article while googling for data about the engine TV Tropes runs on. I’ll have to say, this title did catch my curious eye – kuddos on that.

I don’t know how much of a control freak Fast Eddie actually is (and, honestly, I don’t really have time to investigate on that), but as far as I’m concerned, it isn’t necessarily a problem. The only thing that really does matter is the evolution of the wiki (the actions) – the motivations behind this evolution aren’t relevant.
And as a troper, most of the recent major changes (last two years) on TV Tropes felt sad but right – sad, because they took part of the fun away, but right, because I nearly always felt they’d make the site better in the long run.
To take an actual example, creating the “Subjective tropes” category did take part of the fun away from pages such as Dethroning Moment Of Suck, making them harder to find (by removing them from works’ page)… but TV Tropes’ goal is first and foremost to celebrate fiction – in other words, to help it shine. When searching for data about a fandom I enjoy (let’s say, Evangelion), I don’t necessarily want to read about why its haters hate it – that’d take the shine away.
In the same way, protecting frequent troll subjects does present the benefit of diminishing the troll frequency, which in turn helps make things look a little brighter.
In a word, TV Tropes is a positive wiki, whereas Wikipedia, for instance, is a neutral wiki (it theoretically doesn’t try to make stuff look good or bad).
So, yeah. Everything isn’t perfect, and the fun does get reduced, but I still think the global result is positive.

There are a few things I can’t accept in your article, though.

Firstly, your assertion that “creating a wiki requires”.
By saying that, you suppose a wiki is supposed to comply with a model that is considered to be good, desirable and, to be blunt, absolute.
I don’t think someone who is internet- (or even media-) savvy would expect anything absolute from a website just because of a “wiki” tag, but that’s exactly what you’re doing here.
Tags are just that – words to help people grasp an entity from an external point of view. A website labelled as a wiki will probably contain information about something, and it will probably be edited by a community.
However, once you’ve decided to get “in”, to “enter” the entity, the tags don’t mean anything anymore. You may discover only trusted editors can edit some pages, for instance – and that wouldn’t necessarily mean the wiki isn’t any good.
My point being, use tags to find what you’re looking for (an information cluster), not to criticize it. Wiki never are egalitarian by nature (ah, nature, an interesting word that is disturbingly easy to deconstruct); they frequently are egalitarian by choice.
TV Tropes may not be like Wikipedia, but from TV Tropes’ point of view, that’s a pretty good thing (the reverse may be true, and both are probably right – don’t forget, they don’t have the same goal in the first place!).

Secondly, comparing Wikipedia and TV Tropes’ heads to Queen Elizabeth II and pre-Revolutionary French monarchs feels inadequate.
There’s an important difference between internet communities and the Great Britain and French kingdoms – people come to internet communities, whereas they usually don’t choose to be French or English.
Because of this difference, what can usually be considered to be wrong for monarchies isn’t necessarily wrong for internet communities – it’s a different values system, since people can just leave. Furthermore, internet communities that don’t have an efficient decision making system usually end up dying, so having a monarch can be better than not having one for the sake of the community. Equality is a beautiful word, but it isn’t always a good thing on the internet (think Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, for instance – that being said, newbies are another good reason to limit rights).

Lastly, I’d like to know why having an otaku community is a problem.
TV Tropes celebrates fiction; glancing at the creation streams, one can easily spot Japan as being an huge fiction works nest. Its anime and drama industry can quite easily compete with the American TV industry, and that’s not even taking the manga industry in account – this one far outclasses the American comics industry if one only looks at numbers. Not gonna talk about video games and visual novels, things would get ridiculous.
Because of this special position Japan is in, the proportion of Japanese fiction among TV Tropes pages isn’t exactly a surprise… so why would a big proportion of Japanese culture enthusiasts be strange or problematic? This whole paragraph about otaku looks like either a troll or a genuine otaku hate rant to me. Either way, distasteful.

Hum… Nothing to add for now, I think.
Thanks for writing this article – it was an interesting read nonetheless.

If the comment above is typical of the site’s users I’m not surprised it’s a dump. The pages I have seen generally start with a huge block of examples drawn from Japanese cartoons – overwhelmingly formulaic overlong rubbish – followed by tropes drawn from the same tiny pool of other media. It’s like DeviantArt, in the sense that it’ll probably be around forever, bumping along at its current level, unable to effectively monetise itself – unlike for example KnowYourMeme, which overlaps with TVTropes in certain respects, or the CheezBurger network. I’m sure TVTropes’ owner would love that kind of money, and he really needs to sit down and work out how he’s going to get it. Not like this.

Anime is first because they started alphabetizing the media lists, rather than just shoving them in random order like they used to, and you’re unfairly hard on it, but the fact that the same few shows/books/etc. seem to be plugged repeatedly with few listings of anything outside that even if they’re appropriate is true.

My 2011 New Years resolution was to leave that site and never come back. Since then, my writing style’s improved, I come up with stories regularly, I speak more fluently, I generally avoid shounen anime, and I’m more social. Still a nerd, but less so.
All that site will ever do for you is make you miss the forest for the trees. That would be fine if it hadn’t been gradually declining since Chris-Chan. To be honest, though maybe it’s just my nostalgia kicking in, I liked the anarchic, sexual forum-in-disguise it once was.

Hey, found your site by Googling to see if anyone thought Tvtropes was a f***ed up as I did.

Never been a mod or contribute, just stumbled on the TvTropes site as part of my Movies interest. I thought Hey, neat! A wiki about the cliches and formulas of films and tv, this oughta be fun. Spent about four hours on there, never going back. I also had the misfortune of reading a page of Troper Tales; my soul has been blackened. And I’ve stumbled unwittingly into sites like Rotten and Encyclopedia Dramatica.

I’m PO’d they have the gall to call that site TvTropes – it should be called ten popular geek Shows/Films and every Anime/Cartoon tropes. Most of the articles are named from inside jokes in Japanese terms or other obscure things. Some phenomenal and classic movies/films/books have ten trope examples. Any anime or cartoon, no matter how obscure or old, will invariably have 40+. The only literature examples are from books everyone’s been made to read in high school English or exclusively from a few of the following; Star Wars, Harry Potter, Twilight, Animorphs or Anita Blake or some Fantasy title that anyone who is over twelve and still reads has never heard of.

I would be embarrassed if that was my site – and I’d have already wiped it clean and started it over, with my foot on the (Proverbial) throat of these overly sensitive, deluded women and man childs that have apparently flooded the site with their mind boggling infatuations with children’s media. Not a site for film and television buffs. False f***ing advertising.

I completely agree and actually googled ‘tv tropes changed’ to see if anyone thought the way I did. Glad to see that this is the case.

An issue I saw with the site is how, once, an admin (or Fast Eddie) put a trope up for deletion or renaming or something along those lines. A list was in the very first post as an example of ‘what not to say’ regarding the issue. It essentially listed all of the possible arguments one could have against this removal/renaming, and underneath these possible arguments made bullshit responses as to why they thought that argument was pointless. But in fact, a lot of the arguments listed were good reason for NOT removing/renaming said trope. I was furious. However, the admins (and the users who were wannabe admins and were kissing Fast Eddie’s ass) did not care, did not listen to reason. They did it and they did it their way without caring about the userbase. That is when I stopped visiting my once-beloved site.

TV Tropes is (or rather, was) not known for being an informative well-respected wiki as it was for its jovial editing atmosphere. It used to be an incredible amount of fun for me. I used to visit it every single god damn day, without fail. But with the realizations that the admins are running an authoritarian ship that brushes off the opinion of its users with an overwhelming air of smugness? Well, in my eyes, at least, this once-colourful beetle is on its back and in its death throes.

…I haven’t noticed much about the anime section yet.But I’m sure you are all just overreacting now.There are alot more literature like Terry Prachett and James Patterson(not as much Dean Koontz though sadly)and the large variety of movies can get really obscure.The so much anime is there because anime is getting alot more popular now.Even though,I am noticing a tightlipped and snooty theme in the How to pages.

Oh goooood it’s not just me!! *weeps*
It has become dreadful. I haven’t spent a week’s worth of TV Trope trawling for about a year. They removed all the best bits…and they give no help the Wiki who’s desperate to save all the (good) Troper Tales, especially of Hello, Insert Name Here which was always fantastic…
All I do on this site now is update a small web original thing I help with…

Thanks for expressing your ideas. I’d also like to say that video games have been at any time evolving. Today’s technology and improvements have assisted create authentic and active games. Most of these entertainment video games were not really sensible when the real concept was first of all being tried. Just like other designs of technological innovation, video games as well have had to grow by means of many years. This itself is testimony towards fast growth of video games.
I’ve observed in the world the present moment, video games are the latest phenomenon with kids of all ages. There are times when it may be unattainable to drag your children away from the games. If you want the best of both worlds, there are lots of educational activities for kids. Good post.
An additional issue is video games can be serious in nature with the principal focus on finding out rather than leisure. Although, we have an entertainment element to keep your kids engaged, every game is usually designed to work with a specific set of skills or program, such as math concepts or technology. Thanks for your write-up.
I have realized some considerations through your website post. One other stuff I would like to state is that there are lots of games in the marketplace designed mainly for toddler age kids. They include pattern acknowledgement, colors, pets, and designs. These usually focus on familiarization as an alternative to memorization. This helps to keep little kids occupied without having a sensation like they are studying. Thanks
Another issue is that video gaming has become one of the all-time most significant forms of fun for people of various age groups. Kids enjoy video games, and adults do, too. The particular XBox 360 is probably the favorite gaming systems for people who love to have a lot of activities available to them, as well as who like to relax and play live with some others all over the world. Thank you for sharing your opinions.

That stinks quite a lot of “if you don’t like it, then you can giiiiiiit out!“.

And thanks for telling me you like a website where the victim of several pedophiles’ advances was banned for being “rude” to the pedophiles. And the same website where a page about one of the most famous works of literature was deleted because obviously it has the same artistic merit as an anime where a 10 year old girl tries to have sex with her teacher.

I mean, fuck, you’d even get banned from reddit for saying that these days.

Wil – I very much hope you can back that up. You can’t just publish statements like that unless you can prove they are true using evidence admissible in defamation proceedings.

In response to the original article, to me much of it seems rather straw man. I think you’ve built up an image of what wiki is supposed to be seemingly based only on what you personally would like the word “wiki” to mean.

If you can point me to evidence that the internet in general has agreed that “wiki” means everything you’ve assumed then fine – I think the most you can then reasonably say is “this is not a wiki and calling it a wiki is misleading for these reasons”.

Otherwise why give a toss about what goes on behind the scenes (and it is very much behind the scenes – only a tiny fraction of the site’s users ever contribute anything) provided there’s no law breaking, discrimination based on protected characteristics, trope-producing sweatshops etc. involved in the whole circus? It’s not like the website is a public body or has to be in anyway accountable to anybody (except in so far as it has to conduct itself in compliance with applicable laws).

Whilst I agree with some of the points in the original article, as above, I can’t see how you’ve supported the central assumption on which it is based.

There was at least one user who forum regulars knew to be 15, but they would still hit on her anyway. It’d be borderline okay if it were people her own age, but these were adults flirting with her. After complaining, I believe she was banned for being mean to her harassers. And yes, the TV Tropes page for Lolita was temporarily deleted because many tropers didn’t see any distinction between it and several pedophilic anime series.

And the entire purpose of a wiki is community editing. Otherwise it’s just a static webpage. You can use software such as MediaWiki to host content (for example, FAQs/knowledge bases), but they’re not referred to as wikis as such.

Eh, it’s like capitalism (except when limited by the government). Not always great, but not always bad. Sometimes awful, sometimes fantastic. If you don’t like a coffee shop’s coffee, do you March in and demand that it shut down or change it’s brewing style? No… Or, if you did, you’d either be laughed at or escorted off the property. So really, the solution is to either go back home and brew coffee in your own coffee pot, find a different shop, or hey, if you think your coffee is better and that the customers should be able to choose your style of coffee–build your own coffee shop. Yes, you absolutely have the right to say in public, in your home, or in your own coffee shop that the other should change or even shut down, and if you think it did something unlawful, then, by all means, report it!

I guess it is a bit “giiiiit out!” (And I’m NOT defending TVtropes’s actions that you’ve mentioned. I haven’t even said whether or not I like the site. I haven’t decided.) but really now, the poster was polite about it, which, in my own opinion, was much more respect than deserved.

I can tell you though, that if I owned a coffee shop, you might not like my coffee if you stopped by. If you don’t like it, perhaps I’ll know of a tea shop down the road to recommend.

Fascism is an extreme of capitalism, to be specific. It is a merger of corporate and state power, as Mussolini himself described it, which pretty much allows corporations to rule in the name of the state. As Lenin once said, fascism is capitalism in decay. Fascism and national socialism are two entirely different things, and even then, despite functioning economically via socialism, Nazism still had some strong fascist attitudes which prevented it from being reasonably functional as a whole, besides solely the economic aspect. The “two sides of the same coin” thing is often an excuse used by conservatives to demonize both sides while also dodging the fact that fascism leans to the right, so I’ve always found it extremely dubious.

And it’s in that very previous paragraph of mine that I find your last statement to be befuddlingly contradictory. How are they not on the right if they’re fascist??

For one, fascism is practically capitalism’s last resort of survival, if it’s in as serious of a condition of desperation. You know how Benito Mussolini defined fascism? As a “merger between state and corporate power.” You notice the term corporate in there? Capitalism and fascism ARE inherently locked into each other.

Even in its “purest form”, capitalism would still require the ruthless exploitation of the proletariat in order to function. Competition is a primitive mental disease that humanity should have outgrown ages ago along the lines of our societal evolution. If you read Oscar Wilde’s “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”, you’ll find that the “human nature” argument is nothing more than a desperate fallacy to justify the existence of capitalism, and that humanity’s best chances of not just survival, but also of freely expressing the TRUE nature of humanity, is to work for the benefit of humanity as a whole, instead of against each other. Greed isn’t a corrosive element that degrades capitalism, it’s the fucking lifeblood of capitalism. You can’t accumulate as much money as possible without relinquishing your soul and stepping over as many innocent people as possible. That’s a historically proven fact. Capitalism isn’t just inherently evil, it is the ULTIMATE evil, and must be destroyed and purged from humanity as soon as possible.

Fair enough, but from the point of view of the average user that’s an irrelevant sideshow that most never even get close to knowing about (I don’t condone it, I just don’t think it has any realistic connection to the mainstream parts of the site).

“Community editing” doesn’t necessarily come with heavy doses of egalitarianism attached and there’s an argument to say that some staticity (if that is even a word – but I’m sure you know what I mean) is a good thing because it guards against tit-for-tat edit wars and creates a more stable resource. The point is that isn’t only one way to do it such that every other way is wrong.

None of you mention the one who was wrongfully banned? The one who called that girl out for coming to a discussion board only to mock everyone on the other side of the argument whilst providing no arguments of her own? I was banned twice because an idiot abused their power, and then attacked by you ignorant, hypocritical, selfrighteous pieces of shit, and when I get MY hands on power, I’m going to destroy TvTropes and somethingawful, and ruin the lives of every single Goddamn goon.

It’s pretty ironic, actually. For all the shit you guys give tropers, you’re pretty much less clever, unfunny versions of them. Maybe you shouldn’t try so hard, wait a while for something to come to you, otherwise you’ll always be stuck with generic garbage like this.

No matter how long I have to wait, you deluded pieces of shit are going to pay. You can think I’m full of shit all you like, in fact, I encourage it. The fact that you’re all so sure I’ll never get back at you will make all the more satisfying when I do. Boy, I’ll bet lola will lose her shit, I’m telling you, I would pay through the ass to see her reaction. SomethingAwful shut down, all the goons’ futures completely destroyed, and me, Colonel McBadass, rubbing it in every single day. Hey, crazier things have happened!

You’ll be sorry when your lives have been anally dry-fucked, and Lowtax won’t sell me jack shit. He and Fast Eddie will shut down their sites and I will build suitable replacements for them. (Preferably without selfrighteous suicide baiters or people who come to discussion boards to act like retards.)

That might have passed for clever if it made any sense. You guys… just don’t pay attention. Let me put it simply: (klk) (eeeeee) Ahem. YOU’RE NOT FUCKING SPIDER-MAN. YOU ARE NOT FUCKING RODNEY DANGERFIELD. YOU ARE NOT A BOTTOMLESS MINE OF COMIC GOLD. YOU ARE NOT CLEVER, NOR FUNNY, NOR MILDLY INTERESTING. YOUR “WITTY BANTER” CONSISTS SOLEY OF HEAD SHAPE JOKES, GENERIC FAT JOKES, AND TIRED ATTEMPTS AT CLEVERNESS THAT RANGE FROM GENERIC AT BEST, TO COMPLETELY NONSENSICAL AT WORST. YOUR VIGILANTISM TOWARDS PEOPLE MORALLY INFERIOR TO YOU, AND YOUR SENSE OF HUMOR WERE YOUR ONLY REDEEMING QUALITIES, BUT YOU NOW SUICIDE BAIT PEOPLE, AND LAUGH AT TRAGEDIES, YOU, UNLIKE ME, REFUSE TO CONSIDER YOU MIGHT BE WRONG ABOUT THE PEOPLE YOU BRUTALISE, REFUSE TO CONSIDER YOU MIGHT HAVE MADE A MISTAKE, THE ONES YOU’RE RIGHT ABOUT ARE SCUM, BUT YOU PEOPLE ARE NOW MONSTERS, MANY TIMES WORSE THAN THE PEOPLE YOU ATTACK. Oh, and as one who’s had to suffer though said attacks? Your sense of humor sucks. Head shape jokes. Christ.

Oh, I don’t think anyone’s made a mistake about you. You’ve said in the past you’re a pedophile. You’re also overweight. You also feel agressively entitled to anything with a vagina. QED

(seriously, what’s with the suicide baiting comment? do you think the only people who mock you are from SA or TVT?)

You forgot about all the pedophiles and rape fetishists. They had an absolute fit when the site was (rightly) scrubbed of some pretty sick shit back around April.

Not that it could fix the biggest rpoblem with that site – a userbase of tone deaf dweebs who confuse listing “X Happened” with real analysis.

You forgot about all the pedophiles and rape fetishists. They had an absolute fit when the site was (rightly) scrubbed of some pretty sick stuff back around April.

Not that it could fix the biggest problem with that site – a userbase of tone deaf dweebs who confuse listing “X Happened” with real analysis.

It was scrubbed of some “sick shit.” It was also scrubbed of things that have a reputation they don’t actually live up to of being “sick shit.” Kodomo no Jikan and Lotte no Omocha stand out in that — there are legitimately artless pedophilic anime and manga with no real redeeming value as works of literature. (not going to get into any other value or detriment they might or might not have beyond this, because that gets ugly, fast.) These are not examples of such. In its earliest stages, it was even scrubbed of noted, respected works of art that had some questionable content, like “Lolita”, before people finally said “this is stupid” and started organizing the clean-up to some degree.

I’m… mixed on the Rape tropes. On the one hand, they’re ugly, smelly, nasty tropes that shouldn’t exist and their pages are triggering by their very nature even if they’re handled with the utmost decorum and sensitivity (which they aren’t, generally — the latest versions are actually ”toned down” from even more hilariously awful older versions which mostly had names like “Rape is Okay if it’s “) but unfortunately, they do exist, and thus do technically fall under TV Tropes’ purview.

Fast Eddie is ridiculously totalitarian. He once removed a type of formatting from the wiki (strikethrough, incidentally) solely because he personally disliked it. In this case, he didn’t even pretend to have a better reason.

And yes, some things were pointlessly named after Japanese terms or the like. Fast Eddie has heavily fought against this to the point of taking it too far in the other direction, though, trying to rename tropes like “Tsundere” that really don’t have a good alternative English title — the particular preoccupation with and delineation of this character type are specifically Japanese, and due to less attention to such characters in the West outside of anime and manga fandom that’s prone to just using the Japanese turn, there really isn’t a simple word or phrase in English that does a good job of encapsulating the character type.

…So, yeah. I definitely think TV Tropes has problems, and I definitely think the article is right about some of them… but in others I think its analysis is too two-dimensional, and in yet others I think it’s flat out wrong about what’s the problem.

That said, I’m just now getting to your third post, Will, which is unarguably about things that are hugely wrong with both TV Tropes and the larger society. (both internet and offline) Just reading it makes me very glad I stayed away from the forums, where the worst of it happened, only going if I had an issue to raise with regards to managing or editing a site which I am increasingly distancing myself from as it goes down in flames due to a combination of a community far more toxic than I ever realized and a totalitarian admin who — when not engaged in his own misguided personal crusades — is more interested in treating the symptoms than the actual problem.

See, if the site had any sort of quality control, you might have a point about the real life sections. In practice, they lead to the most mind-numbingly narrow-minded and idiotic examples of the lot, filled with overly sheltered teens/young adults putting thinly veiled whining about their lives into video game tropes and trying to squeeze in their skeletal knowledge of complex foreign relations into simple fiction cliches. Yes, people use tropes all the time in real life, but your argument assumes that the people who edit that site are mature enough to handle the real life sections.

Well! I once Troping in the TVtropes only to got Banned repeatedly from TVtropes website itself just because I telling Tropers that Politically Correct shit(that people calls “RL Issues”) isn’t the only things that matters and happens as well exists In our Home Sweet Home Universe as well I also tells people in TVtropes that Conspiracy Theories and ‘Fringe’ stuff in General are Real Life examples of more Sci-fi and Fantasy tropes

oh yeah I also makes TVtropes page of my Project: http://epicxovermovie.webs.com/ only to later got deleted from TVtropes and people from TVtropes don’t want my Project anymore in TVtropes just because my project are Conspiracy-laden not to mention some people out there accuses my Project for Canon-rape and turning canon characters into Mary Sues regardless the best thing that I do to balancing it’s characters, so that’s why I make this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDdLMYC_HKI as response of the deletion of TVtropes page of my Project

another reason people from TVtropes don’t want me in TVtropes is: I’m the only one in TVtropes that averts “all Tropers are Skeptics” trope

I know this might get replied with ridicule and attacked by extremists of both sides,but:
TV Tropes wiki is A-OK,as far as I’m concerned
The forums on the other hand suffer from incompetent mods and an EXTREMELY overly so-called “accepting” creator/head mod
Is it sick that these imbeciles and failures in morality(Pedophiles,murderers,supremacists and racists,I mean) are allowed to stand among us?Yes.
Should they be allowed to be post on these forums?Fuck no
Does the site suffer from extremely idiotic management?Of course
But the rest of the community(most video game forums I’ve seen,anyway) are pretty tame and look down on the above mentioned filth,hell it was “said” in every article mentioning them that the Fetish fuel and Troper tales pages were disturbing as hell,it was put in the Nightmare fuel page.

And let’s face it,just because there’s a dark corner WITH these people,doesn’t mean that the rest of the community has to suffer from it.

There were kids that killed their parents for Halo,there was the Aurora shooting,Hitler liked dogs.

Every site,group,country,planet,race,whatever the hell you want to call the collection of people at the moment,has filth among them,no exception.

Hi! Old article, also good article! It’s kinda hard to really comment on it in 2014 without being intimate on recent events, whatever those may be. I take issue to one thing, though: the bit involving Pac-Man and “subjectivity”. I could go on and on about skepticism, but I think it’d be better to just explain the situation.

Pac-Man, as well as E.T., were never really critiqued at the time of their release. Both were also huge successes, with Pac-Man in particular selling a truly insane amount; the problem was that Atari printed a similarly astronomical amount of copies. In fact, that was simply one problem of a large package known as “Atari’s general incompetence”. The Crash was not caused by the quality of these two games, but simply by a bunch of really bad business decisions on Atari’s part.

Moving on from that, I have no problem declaring that Pac-Man is a miserable port in every conceivable way, while E.T. is a completely misunderstood work of genius. Here’s the thing: so is Raiders of the Lost Ark. RotLA is a game made by the same programmer with many of the same concepts and the same execution, and so by all rights is as “confusing” at E.T.; somehow, it has never been so criticized and is commonly hailed as a classic.

That is what the situation is: E.T. and RotLA are a pair of games that are complicated enough to require a small 10+-page manual, and exactly one of these games had been “criticized” for it by some random article written in the mid-’90s that would probably be considered flamebait if it had all been moved to 2014. This game deserves better than some preach-to-the-choir hack/”nerdy” technical breakdown that flatly refuses to change what may as well be anti-thinking.

Oh, and since someone will likely comment about that meaningless cart grave, they recently decided to dig it up and found very little, hashtag wow hashtag whoa.

One: The nakama page has been changed.

Two: Japanese words sound cool because of how foreign they are.

Three: I’d prefer a wiki that looks casual but is actually highly regulated to a wiki that is bland to read on the surface but is actually anarchy underneath.

I don’t give as crap about the reasons behind this rant but Fuck TV Tropes, they’re always busting people about natter or poor grammar and paragraphing and shit. They have the nerve to bring this bunk up when these asshats don;t even do a very good job of managing the horse crap that gets posted on their misaligned wiki’s? What a load of shit!
I got banned because of said dumb-ass reasons for their dung peddling site, about multiple grammatical errors which they didn’t even have the decency to point out to me when I asked what I did wrong.
Frankly I don’t really know why I even bothered with that stupid wiki page run by a pack of drooling and insensitive imbeciles who demand politeness when they themselves are a bunch jerkass lazy beatniks who aren’t even worthy to finger paint let alone run a webpage. Fuck TVTropes and Damn Fast Eddie to hell for brewing such a pointless quagmire of a page.

So I’ve read the article and the comment section, and all I’ve seen here is the absolute worst brought out of both communities.

I don’t really care about or particularly like tvtropes, but generalizing entire communities the way you do in this article is sad, especially when you call them all pedophiles rather than only the people who actually did it, isn’t that the type of ignorant behavior you’re trying to speak out against? You cannot sit there and honestly think of yourself as progressive when you display such hypocrisy.

The comment section here is very typical to the internet. I’ve seen edgy forums of 4chan more civil than this. You should be ashamed, the people here should be ashamed.

I hope in the years that past you’re now a more reasonable and respectable human being.

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