TvTropes - "It's like rickrolling, but your trapped all day"
- Thread starter arrow_storm
- Start date
Err........ I have looked at the site and neither fully understand what it is or why people get stuck there/what people do there.
I'm not going there now, 'cause I need to go to work soon. But if I were to... Man, I'd be stuck...
It's an encyclopedia of recurring things such as plots, character types, and so on, in popular culture.MrDeckard said:
It happened a lot in the beginning, but I guess it's just something that disappears with time as you've read the ones that are most interesting for you. Still, it's a mighty and dangerous time sink xD
So, so frequently. And I love every minute of it. Some guy linked to it in one of the magazine articles on this site, way back in 2008, and I've been reading it ever since then.
A word of advice: unless you have a will of iron, never, NEVER view the Warhammer [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Warhammer40000] 40,000 [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SchmuckBait] page. It lists a couple thousand tropes with detailed descriptions for each one. It would take several hours to simply read the page itself, and that's to say nothing for the eight dozen tabs you'll have open by the time you reach the bottom.
A word of advice: unless you have a will of iron, never, NEVER view the Warhammer [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Warhammer40000] 40,000 [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SchmuckBait] page. It lists a couple thousand tropes with detailed descriptions for each one. It would take several hours to simply read the page itself, and that's to say nothing for the eight dozen tabs you'll have open by the time you reach the bottom.
This.SelectivelyEvil13 said:
The only reason I felt people would get so caught up in TVTropes is because it uses so many bloody arbitrary terms, with no explanation on the page that you were reading, that you are literally forced to open every other page that that page links to in order to understand what the hell you were reading in the first place.
It feels more like a damned scavenger hunt to figure out what they're talking about. If TVTropes used more understandable language, like "Rule of One Female" instead of "The Smurfette Principle," or "Confusing/Arbitrary Ending" instead of "Gainax Ending" (or whatever it was), then it wouldn't be such a pain to get through everything. Instead, you'd click stuff if you wanted to, not because it was a requirement to understand the page.
It's because of this attitude that TvTropes has changed many of the trope names to provide clarity for casual readers, to the consternation of many tropers.Miles Tormani said:
Oh, it has changed names for the sake of clarity?epic_ellen said:
My bad, then. Haven't really paid too much attention to the site, as you can no doubt guess.
child of lileth said:
What possible reason could there be for looking up "Stupid Sexy Flanders" on there?
On topic: No, I've never found myself stuck in the site. I go there occasionally to look up a series I'm currently watching and spend a few minutes clicking through some of the links, and then I go back to whatever I was doing before going on TvTropes. Do you want to know what my secret to not getting stuck on there is?
I have willpower.
Although I fully understand your point-of-view on this, the strange, nonsensical and flat-out random trope names are what makes it so interesting for me personally. The referances to the Xanatos Gambit [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XanatosGambit] confused the hell out of me until I read it, then it was all "oh! I've seen that". Then that page links you to related things and you go there to see what they are. Rather than annoying me, it intrigued me.Miles Tormani said:
And yeah, the names make it hard to understand at first, but when you read the article you usually end up understanding why it's called that random weird name that nobody understood, at times it can even (seem) a logical choice, if not the most understandible.
NOTE: Some others have said this, but being stuck on Tv Tropes for 5 hours isn't neccessarily bad, in fact, quite often it's funny and ammusing. Thats why its so hard to leave. Also, unless your mouse wheel is broken each trope page will probably lead to (At least) two tabs being opened. It is a physical effort to stop opening tabs and go through and close all your open ones.
NOTE2: Read the trope names in context as well. To this day I have not read the Mooks [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Mooks] page and yet I completely understand what it means. Same goes for Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ImperialStormtrooperMarksmanshipAcademy] and Sealed Evil in a Can [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SealedEvilInACan].
It wasn't that I specifically looked for it. It was more that I was looking up what they had to say about some anime, and then I saw that link in the list of tropes, and never heard of it before. So after checking it, it lead into about 50 minutes or so of looking at some of the examples they had listed. One thing just kept leading to another.Alpha1089 said:child of lileth said:
What possible reason could there be for looking up "Stupid Sexy Flanders" on there?
I do get stuck once in a while, but never to the insane point that I have 25 tabs open at once. I used to browse the site for a good few hours every single day. Now I've cleared out most of the tropes and series that interest me, so it's not as bad now. I do have to go straight to the site after I watch a new show or movie though.
There are a few reasons I've thought up to why it's so addictive.arrow_storm said:
1. It does a lot of self advertising. Seriously, how many links to other articles are on every page?
2. You need to read other articles to understand/clarify the one you're reading. You need to open new tabs because the links in the first article weren't obvious as to what they meant(ex. Xanatos Gambit).
3. It's funner than Wikipedia. For whatever reason, Wikipedia has seemed to get more and more anal about what qualifies as important, and much of the pop culture references and smaller parts of culture gets ignored. For example, Aetheria Epics(a webcomic) isn't on Comixpedia, but it is on TvTropes.
On a different note, I can usually keep track of time and stop myself from getting tied up.