TV Tropes will ruin your life. It’s true — you can take my word for it. Unless you’d rather spend hours reading about the nuances of fiction they’ve complied to explain why writers write the things they do and don’t, and why readers respond the way they do and don’t.
It’s a lost abyss of blackness from which you emerge days later, not quite smarter, but still feeling rather fuzzy headed and unable to look at any medium of reality-expressed-as-art the same way again.
Many of you are probably well aware of the website TVtropes.org In fact, you may be scoffing at my naivety and unculturedness and utter lack of “hip” by being so far behind the times. To you I say, “Deal with it.” I don’t like technology, I don’t have a Facebook account and I take notes by hand. Get over it.
To the less judgmental (or more old-fashioned) of you, you may be asking, “What is TVtropes.org?” Or, perhaps more generally, “What is a trope?” Well it certainly isn’t a cliché, they’ll have you know. The website defines them as simply “devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations.” It’s a fascinating concept, the “what” we write, not why or how, but exactly what we all write, in some way or another, in every narrative form. We tend to write about the same topic and theme in one way or another.
I first found TVtropes.org while doing research for a paper. Of course, by “paper” here, I mean the stuff I was reading instead of the academic articles I was supposed to be citing in my work. It’s embarrassing how easy it is to spend hours on articles with titles like “Anachronism Stew” or “Genius Bonus,” but I did. Oh, I did. But what I love most about TV Tropes is that they don’t lie to you, nor do they assault you with some kind of super-truth or well-researched fact pools. They don’t care about truth because tropes don’t care about truth. Tropes care about confirming or, less commonly, surprising audience’s expectations. TV Tropes seeks to explain this push and pull without notation or reference or pseudo-research.
It doesn’t pretend to be a good use of time, but it certainly is a fascinating exploration of why TV, film, literature and even advertising operate in the strange and often-dysfunctional way they do.
Why did “Donnie Darko” refuse to explain anything in its plot? Oh, because it assumes "Viewers Are Geniuses." Why did Samuel L. Jackson wield a purple light saber in “Attack of the Clones?” Well, because “Purple is Powerful.” The list goes on and on. And then you begin to see why TV Tropes will ruin your life. I’ll admit, even while I was writing this column, I got severely distracted by “Chekov’s Gun” and an entry on “Primer,” which, as my editor can tell you, caused me to submit this column past deadline.
But what I love most about TV Tropes is that it revels in its interlinked ability to waste your day because, after all, at least you’re learning.
Reach the columnist at Alesha.Rimmelin@asu.edu
Click here to subscribe to the daily State Press newsletter.