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Got to love how that last one is just "It's Santa's train. Don't question it." when the fact that it was magic was kind of the point. To these guys, the fact there's a train that travels to the North Pole should have set their "traintism" meters off.
I feel the same way when someone is complaining about some aspect of Star Trek being unrealistic when the whole fucking series relies on Faster-Than-Light travel being real.
 
An anonymous account posted something on the ATT article about Kiwi Farms.
By "pedophile" does this article only mean the ones who actually act on their desire by watching/sharing CP and/or molesting kids? Because if they're also including people who are attracted to children but restrain themselves and never watch/share CP or molest kids (or attempt to do any of the above), then I don't think labelling them as "Asshole Victim"s is warranted anymore than people who have urges to murder but never actually do it.
https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Topic:Ti922l6ke7eq6tua
 
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SmallReferencePools
If anyone thinks TV Tropes isn't filled with hipsters, show them this. They think Golden Axe is "too mainstream", for one thing.

TV Tropes and tropers have a cargo cult mindset when it comes to storytelling and its conventions.

They do not understand what really goes into storytelling, or any creative endeavor for that matter. They celebrate tropes for simply existing and assume a work is good simply because it contains a lot of they tropes they recognize, not because of any actual quality or talent present in the writing.

These circlejerk pages, like the Pantheon page, is the shrine they have built for tropes. Like the island tribes that built imitation airstrips and radio equipment in the wake of WWII, they have taken these tropes, these building blocks that they have no idea how to use or what to do with, and they have put them on a pedestal, not as narrative devices, but as memes they can use to substitute for actual thoughts, emotions, and statements.

A troper writes a story by outlining a list of tropes and minor details that they like and want their story to have (The color of the hero's hair, the main girl's bust size, their underwear, whether or not any of them wear glasses, the length of a girl's socks) and expect these lashed-together heaps of tropes and character archetypes will somehow transform into a coherent narrative, and they refuse to recognize that this never happens.

This is why they wave trash like "Fallout: Equestria" around like the printed word of God Himself, because according to tropers, these fanfics have lots and lots of tropes and surely that is all a story needs, right? And then they look at actual literature by actual writers such as Hemingway, Shakespeare, and John Steinbeck and they get confused and angry. "Where is the Nakama?" They ask, furiously thumbing through their public library's copy of Of Mice and Men. "Where's the Big Bad?, The fight scenes? The comic relief character that breaks the fourth wall? Why doesn't this book have more tropes? This book fuckin' sucks!"

TV Tropes is a website of confused islanders, building straw airplanes and cutting fake landing strips hoping that they'll magically create a real airport.
 
TV Tropes and tropers have a cargo cult mindset when it comes to storytelling and its conventions.

They do not understand what really goes into storytelling, or any creative endeavor for that matter. They celebrate tropes for simply existing and assume a work is good simply because it contains a lot of they tropes they recognize, not because of any actual quality or talent present in the writing.

These circlejerk pages, like the Pantheon page, is the shrine they have built for tropes. Like the island tribes that built imitation airstrips and radio equipment in the wake of WWII, they have taken these tropes, these building blocks that they have no idea how to use or what to do with, and they have put them on a pedestal, not as narrative devices, but as memes they can use to substitute for actual thoughts, emotions, and statements.

A troper writes a story by outlining a list of tropes and minor details that they like and want their story to have (The color of the hero's hair, the main girl's bust size, their underwear, whether or not any of them wear glasses, the length of a girl's socks) and expect these lashed-together heaps of tropes and character archetypes will somehow transform into a coherent narrative, and they refuse to recognize that this never happens.

This is why they wave trash like "Fallout: Equestria" around like the printed word of God Himself, because according to tropers, these fanfics have lots and lots of tropes and surely that is all a story needs, right? And then they look at actual literature by actual writers such as Hemingway, Shakespeare, and John Steinbeck and they get confused and angry. "Where is the Nakama?" They ask, furiously thumbing through their public library's copy of Of Mice and Men. "Where's the Big Bad?, The fight scenes? The comic relief character that breaks the fourth wall? Why doesn't this book have more tropes? This book fuckin' sucks!"

TV Tropes is a website of confused islanders, building straw airplanes and cutting fake landing strips hoping that they'll magically create a real airport.

The Pantheon is fucking cancer infused with HIV and Ebola, and epitomizes the sheer lack of understanding they have of how to put a story together.

First off, the Pantheon is essentially CWCville on a cross-media scale, with characters from all sorts of media and real life personalities all existing side by side, albeit badly, because aside from the popular characters who get assloads of fanfic written around them, the rest are just there to tick a box.

Almost all the crossovers can be linked to the wank fantasies of thirsty permavirgins writing fanfic for characters they love, especially that weird motherfucker who has a gargantuan hard-on for Litchi Faye-Ling from Blaz Blue.

The Pantheon itself gets updated based on what's popular at the time, so characters get shifted around all the time, to the point they need no shit Google Docs to keep it all straight and you can still tell they did a shit job of cleaning out information on characters that used to be there.

The actual stories themselves are exercises in jacking off crossed with trying to shoehorn in as many tropes as possible mixed with a shit load of wish fulfillment, especially for the more thirsty tropers (go read any of the fanfic they wrote for most of the more liked female characters, these guys have obviously never seen a real woman naked in their lives), and are filled with autistic cringe.

We could probably have an entire subthread just trying to parse that autism.
 
"Where is the Nakama?" They ask, furiously thumbing through their public library's copy of Of Mice and Men. "Where's the Big Bad?, The fight scenes? The comic relief character that breaks the fourth wall? Why doesn't this book have more tropes? This book fuckin' sucks!"

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E:
What's a pantheon? I've seen that subpage on a few things but never looked at it.

An entire section devoted to declaring characters gods of certain tropes, then going into way too much fucking detail about the specifics, writing stories about them intermixing, etc.
 
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Pantheon/TropePantheons

Don't worry, we'll be here to help you recover from the autism poisoning.
*selects page at random and goes to it*
*first name I notice is "Derpy Hooves"*
*calmly walks to my fridge and returns with every last drop of alcohol in the house*

In all seriousness though, what the fuck is this even supposed to be? I know just about as much as I did before. I may even know less. This whole thing reads like the manifesto of a cult leader with severe autism or something. I feel like whomever made this would end up in a "Jonestown" scenario if not for the fact that they've long since become too fat to climb the stairs to leave their basement.
 
In all seriousness though, what the fuck is this even supposed to be? I know just about as much as I did before. I may even know less. This whole thing reads like the manifesto of a cult leader with severe autism or something. I feel like whomever made this would end up in a "Jonestown" scenario if not for the fact that they've long since become too fat to climb the stairs to leave their basement.

The simplest way to explain it is this:

It's a crowd sourced fanfic with characters and people from damn near every media thrown into a blender that a bunch of autists write stories about them interacting.
 
I'm rarely at a loss for words, but this is one of the times that I am.

The term "autism" is thrown around a lot on this website, so it's kinda lost a lot of meaning to me since I came here. This, though. Autism in its purest form.
 
Some of the "gods" in the pantheon are just plain bizarre (Mace Windu is the god of bald, black men for fuck's sake). It has devolved into a horrendous mess, as is to be expected by a creative project worked on by dozens who are not in direct contact with each other.
 
Tropes are Tools. This was once one of the pieces of information detailed on the main page. And that was the idea-the idea that these tropes are tools of storytelling, and learning about them could enrich a person's viewing experience-or enhance their creation. However, writers do not think of Tropes in trope terms-yes, they may have a major villain, but they do not think of them as the "Big Bad"-the writer thinks of him as "the asshole that burned down the hero's village and so he swore revenge". Likewise, the writer does not think of the village as a "Doomed Hometown"-just that it needs to get burned to the ground to get his hero out of bed and out kicking ass.

A little exposure to TvTropes can give a person deep insight into how fiction works, how the moving parts all mesh together, but it's like the Necronomicon-the more you read, the more insane it all gets, until you start talking exclusively in tropes, once you Go Mad From the Revelation and scrawl your Madness Manta on the wall with your own blood because you Couldn't Find a Pen. Oh Crap...
 
Some of the "gods" in the pantheon are just plain bizarre (Mace Windu is the god of bald, black men for fuck's sake). It has devolved into a horrendous mess, as is to be expected by a creative project worked on by dozens who are not in direct contact with each other.
I will never understand why they bothered to begin with. Sure it may have been funny trying to consider Toberlone and The Ugly Barnacle as powerful gods. But it's getting out of hand.
 
Tropes are Tools. This was once one of the pieces of information detailed on the main page. And that was the idea-the idea that these tropes are tools of storytelling, and learning about them could enrich a person's viewing experience-or enhance their creation. However, writers do not think of Tropes in trope terms-yes, they may have a major villain, but they do not think of them as the "Big Bad"-the writer thinks of him as "the asshole that burned down the hero's village and so he swore revenge". Likewise, the writer does not think of the village as a "Doomed Hometown"-just that it needs to get burned to the ground to get his hero out of bed and out kicking ass.

A little exposure to TvTropes can give a person deep insight into how fiction works, how the moving parts all mesh together, but it's like the Necronomicon-the more you read, the more insane it all gets, until you start talking exclusively in tropes, once you Go Mad From the Revelation and scrawl your Madness Manta on the wall with your own blood because you Couldn't Find a Pen. Oh Crap...

Even as tools, Tropes are only superficial in their usefulness. You can go your entire life never once reading that site and still be a better writer than any member of its community. In fact you probably have better odds in that case because then your perspectives aren't tainted. The very premise behind the site is masturbatory. These people recycle and reuse the exact same critical analyses because they think writing a work is like doing a math formula or cooking a basic meal. Two parts Hero's Journey. One part Genre Savvy. Add in the instant Five Man Band packet, and sprinkle in some High Octane Nightmare Fuel and Ship Teasing for flavor. This isn't how you write good stories.

When you reduce your work to just component building blocks you're doing a disservice to yourself. When you do it to other people's works, you're doing an even bigger disservice to them. Accusing someone of pulling a Cowboy Bebop at His Computer won't help him improve his writing.
 
Even as tools, Tropes are only superficial in their usefulness. You can go your entire life never once reading that site and still be a better writer than any member of its community. In fact you probably have better odds in that case because then your perspectives aren't tainted. The very premise behind the site is masturbatory. These people recycle and reuse the exact same critical analyses because they think writing a work is like doing a math formula or cooking a basic meal. Two parts Hero's Journey. One part Genre Savvy. Add in the instant Five Man Band packet, and sprinkle in some High Octane Nightmare Fuel and Ship Teasing for flavor. This isn't how you write good stories.

When you reduce your work to just component building blocks you're doing a disservice to yourself. When you do it to other people's works, you're doing an even bigger disservice to them. Accusing someone of pulling a Cowboy Bebop at His Computer won't help him improve his writing.

Brent Laabs even wrote about this:

http://blog.brentlaabs.com/2014/02/troping-considered-harmful.html

Best quote:

So is that the vision, the "catalog of tropes"? Are the tropes wikis a listing of the dissected remains of creative works, mercilessly hunted down in the name of harvesting tropes? I'm not far enough down the spectrum to enjoy that kind of deconstruction.
 
Brent Laabs even wrote about this:

http://blog.brentlaabs.com/2014/02/troping-considered-harmful.html

Best quote:

So is that the vision, the "catalog of tropes"? Are the tropes wikis a listing of the dissected remains of creative works, mercilessly hunted down in the name of harvesting tropes? I'm not far enough down the spectrum to enjoy that kind of deconstruction.

I like the link he gives to that Periodic Table of Tropes image, complete with actual "molecules" used to describe certain works. It just seems so weird, looking at fiction like this. I get common elements is a major part of fiction writing, but has any writer actually been successful by mapping out his story with a bunch of bullshit jargon set up in a list?
 
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