This is kind of off topic, but the YouTube channel “Overly Sarcastic Productions” is full of the TVtropes brand of media analysis and it makes me want to KMS. Red is a person who’s gotten her entire brand of media literacy from obsessing over trope articles. She’s not a lolcow (though the other person on her channel, the history guy, makes terrible videos) but she’s introducing a whole new generation to this shit-tier tvtropes type discussion. She also talks about fucking children’s media like it’s the gospel for narrative writing, to the extent of prioritizing it over actual classics. I also hold a grudge against her for saying 2001 actually sucked but that’s just me being petty.
I like mythology stuff so I run into her content constantly which is annoying because she deliberately sanitizes all her myths (Persephone and Hades totally isn’t rape guyzzz), interprets anything possible as LGBT (like saying the goddess Artemis is “Demiromantic” or some bullshit) and just reads off wikipedia for half her videos. Also general SocJus shit. And yet they have 2 million subscribers from having the most surface level discussion imaginable.
The way she talks is like a walking TvTropes article.
I think the way TvTropes looks at media has to be the most genuinely unproductive way to look at any narrative. Isolating narrative blocks down to tropes, isolated Things that Happen, leads to this bullshit reductive discussion, which is why the entire website is crippled by autism and obsessions with children’s media. It was doomed from the get go.