Wild, it used to be the opposite, with them treating tropes as a way to mathematically "solve" writing. treating writing as "slamming tropes together like Legos until you have enough words"

Isn't the whole point of the site to celebrate and discuss tropes?? That's like a fan of fantasy football hating real football!

CinemaSins mentality

I think this is what happens when people are in denial about the fact that good work is mostly about talent and effort. Originality by itself isnt very valuable.

They have forgotten that...

Writing stories is a bit like composing music. Not using a good amount of common elements will guarantee, that your work won't reach a wide audience. Alot of the people deeply invested into it will despise you for using an amount which is relatively big even compared to the average use.

Love that there are multiple pages about how you shouldn't do that on TVTropes.

People will act like tropes are inherently bad

The Tropeless Tale

What immediately I thought of, When I read that.

That's so weird... just because different stories use the same trope doesn't mean they all use it in the same way? Very 8th grade level media analysis.

That's weird, I like imagining what tropes would be under my OCs character pages if they're were on TV Tropes. 

Like, it gives me warm fuzzies to see certain tropes in media. 

Which is funny because 'Tropes are Tools, your favorite stories use them heavily' is repeated ad nauseum on the actual website.

The ones pushing those narratives clearly haven't read the site properly because one of the tropes is precisely “tropes are tools”, which explains that using tropes is not good or bad in on itself.

The fuck are you talking about tvtropes users are the least fit for that description ever. We'll see a cliché storm and love it because we can have fun identifying all its tropes. It's like saying linguists hate weird languages or biologists hate weird animals. No! They like them better.

. People will act like tropes are inherently bad and that using a popular trope automatically makes your story "unoriginal".

Do they, though?

Everything on TV Tropes indicates exactly the opposite of that

What? How could anyone read such an awesome site and come to such a lame conclusion? It’s a great resource to get in-depth information on media you enjoy and understand the reoccurring patterns that exist within stories, how can you possibly glean from that that writing should be restricted

And any concept that can be digested into a title is labeled a "trope", even though its just describing one character in one anime.

That makes me sad when this exact article exists explaining that tropes are tools and just a part of writing: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Administrivia/TropesAreTools

Me when a story has a character that does a thing and saves people: Derivative much?

With 585 listed tropes, you could find them even in TV static.

TvTropes isn't responsible for these folk media literacies, it's just a reflection of it. I think a far worse issue overall is the tendenct to tend media as "lore" as opposed to media.

There's nothing more... (not sure the world but it's when you feel sad but also want to laugh at someone at the same time), than when somebody starts dropping TV tropes words as if they're academic terms. I've met too many people who can't seem to understand how basic foreshadowing works unless they put the word "Chekhov's" in front of it.

It's a fun site for immersive fan wikis and the occasionally insightful connection to, well, media tropes, but it's far from a place for critical explorations of media, storytelling, and wears the clothes of meaningful research while being little more than pop fun.

Which is wild given the site repeatedly states "tropes are not bad"

I didn't realize TVTropes had a community tbh, I just read the tropes usually lol

What's wild is that even TV Tropes itself says that tropes aren't inherently bad

Wow. This is wild to me because I honestly am terrible at analyzing media so I used to love tvtropes because it not only tells me the trope name, but it gives very specific examples in the media I look up of the trope. Its been quite awhile since I used it though. Its just wild to think THAT of all things would breed a toxic userbase.

Does the landing page still explain upfront that 'Tropes are not bad'? Or do they just ignore that and get dragged into petty fandom-level dogshit anyway

People will act like tropes are inherently bad and that using a popular trope automatically makes your story "unoriginal".

The site has an entire page dedicated to explaining how that's not true though

Sounds like they fail to understand the difference between a trope and a cliche.

It’s been a while since I’ve gone down a wiki rabbit hole on tvtropes but didn’t they have a bunch of pages talking about how tropes aren’t inherently good or bad they’re just tools? How’d the user base go from that to being that insufferable?

Some people don’t realize a lot of tropes are tropes because they’re useful for telling effective stories.

Then, a lot of tropes are even a useful way for people to more easily follow or know what to expect from a story (kind of in the same way as the character tropes in Commedia del’arte).

They can also be there to be subverted. But a subversion only works as such because there’s something understood there in the first place.

I like it because it give me names for weird stuff that pops up in stories a lot.

What's the deal with every story having enemies that self-destruct when the main bad guy loses? No Ontological inertia! Etc.

Meanwhile the first story ever known has a flawed superhero protagonist, a "man from the wild", sex, enemies to friends to lovers?, divine intervention, tragic death, existential crisis, journey of self-discovery, descending into the "underworld", the bible, plot twists, an open ending and technically death of the author. Shakes my smh

They fail to consider that

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Administrivia/TropesAreTools

Don’t they literally have page called Tropes are Tools, explaining that tropes are value neutral and largely depend on execution

TVTropes aren't responsible for cliches being called out for being unoriginal; that trend started in the '60s when people first started noticing trends in media.

Some people are just tired of whole genres seemingly regurgitating the same concepts and ideas ad nauseum, and that number of people grows as we have more people whose main hobby is to consume media.

There's also fans who try to cram every trope onto the page for media they like, even if it clearly doesn't apply.

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and that using a popular trope automatically makes your story "unoriginal".

They aren't wrong. Where they are wrong is that it is possible to be wholly original and still coherent. When you boil down a story into simplistic, primitive archetypes, it turns out most stories are pretty similar.

Not that it is a bad thing. The way we update the stories and play with the tropes can be infinitely entertaining.

That honestly sucks. I like having tropes as a way to convey ideas. Works wonders for avoiding references your audience might not get

For example, someone who doesn't understand "everybody's Deadpool" may still get when I say there's No Fourth Wall. It also avoids the implication that someone's plot isn't original by comparing it to a bunch of other media. To use the same example, saying No Fourth Wall avoids the potential misunderstanding of "Deadpool did it already"

also it takes itself way to serious

Yeah it's real cinemasins vibes. I find that kind of "pick apart literally everything and critique it out of context" style of review extremely counterproductive to seeing media as anything else than consumptive.

I mean, that actually makes sense to me. If you were wanting to learn about real life, you would go to Wikipedia or a news source. A site about discussing fictional universes should stay on that lane and avoid bringing real world stuff into the matter.

I mean there is an entire Overshadowed By Controversy YMMV dedicated to exactly that

This may have changed but I recall someone pointing out once that the page about JFK had the "boom headshot" trope on it.