#tvtropes

LIVE

headspace-hotel:

headspace-hotel:

thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes

reasons for this:

  • basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.
  • like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why.Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.
  • here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.
  • TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.
  • Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”
  • all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope doesand why its specific characteristics let it do that
  • I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.
  • But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.
  • In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.
  • On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”
  • like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not

An incomplete list of really useful or interesting reads from TvTropes.

please note that yes many of these are concepts that exist elsewhere and a few are even taught in fiction writing classes but TvTropes just does an amazing job at displaying the range of things that can be done with them

legitimately so much of the terminology I use to talk about storytelling, and even think about it in my own head, i learned about from TvTropes

this is just a really short list of examples I encourage people who write or otherwise create stories to browse around on this site it’s so useful

#writing reference #writing resource #tvtropes #storytelling #stories #tropes 
Specs has Resources (TW)@the-darkish-side-of-specs
Wed, 23 Feb 2022 10:59:20

iamthecutestofborg:

headspace-hotel:

headspace-hotel:

thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes

reasons for this:

  • basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.
  • like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why.Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.
  • here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.
  • TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.
  • Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”
  • all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope doesand why its specific characteristics let it do that
  • I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.
  • But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.
  • In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.
  • On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”
  • like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not

An incomplete list of really useful or interesting reads from TvTropes.

please note that yes many of these are concepts that exist elsewhere and a few are even taught in fiction writing classes but TvTropes just does an amazing job at displaying the range of things that can be done with them

legitimately so much of the terminology I use to talk about storytelling, and even think about it in my own head, i learned about from TvTropes

this is just a really short list of examples I encourage people who write or otherwise create stories to browse around on this site it’s so useful

YES I love TV tropes so immensely. It combines two things my neurodivergent brain loves: fiction analysis and putting things into categories

#tvtropes #storytelling #stories #tropes #writing reference #writing resources 
Specs has Resources (TW)@the-darkish-side-of-specs
Mon, 06 Sep 2021 13:19:58

TVTropes review on The Museum Of Anything Goes

“The Museum of Anything Goes is a very surreal game from 1995 made by Wayzata Technology.

Perhaps best characterized as an Environmental Narrative Game minus the narrative, the game presents the player with the eponymous museum, where they can enter the various paintings strewn about and come across quirky FMV clips and interactive segments. The FMV clips were primarily filmed around the Chicago area.”

source

Tropes Included:

#the museum of anything goes #information #review #article #cd rom #obscure video games #90s video games #tvtropes #tv tropes 
Official Wiki of The Museum Anything Goes@the-museum-of-anything-goes
Sat, 30 Jun 2018 13:21:14

aqueerkettleofish:

headspace-hotel:

headspace-hotel:

thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes

reasons for this:

  • basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.
  • like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why.Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.
  • here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.
  • TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.
  • Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”
  • all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope doesand why its specific characteristics let it do that
  • I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.
  • But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.
  • In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.
  • On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”
  • like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not

An incomplete list of really useful or interesting reads from TvTropes.

please note that yes many of these are concepts that exist elsewhere and a few are even taught in fiction writing classes but TvTropes just does an amazing job at displaying the range of things that can be done with them

legitimately so much of the terminology I use to talk about storytelling, and even think about it in my own head, i learned about from TvTropes

this is just a really short list of examples I encourage people who write or otherwise create stories to browse around on this site it’s so useful

Also, it’s so fantastically fleshed out and detailed that you can totally get lost in a wikicrawl.

Worth mentioning is that you can look up a piece of media by title, and find a listing of Tropes that it use.

#tvtropes 
sahelian apologist@theothin
Thu, 09 Jun 2022 14:19:26

Why Do We Need Heroes? - The Critical Drinker, Dec. 2, 2020 [X]

“See, we’ve been doing this kind of thing for a lot longer than you might think. In fact, ever since us humans have been able to conceive of stuff beyond our own experience, we’re been kind of fascinated by the idea of heroic characters embarking on epic adventures, righting wrongs, and defeating evil enemies. It’s kind of the basis for our whole civilization. 

… And I guess this is the real point I’m trying to make here: the heroes we create are a symbol and a reflection of our human potential not human reality they represent the very best of what we can and should strive for they encourage us to reach higher to try harder to go further than we ever thought possible. They push us to see beyond the boundaries and limitations of our everyday lives to dream about what we could be instead of fretting about what we are and perhaps most importantly of all they remind us that there’s still something fundamentally good in all of humanity for all our flaws and our mistakes and our weaknesses

It’s our ability to pick ourselves up to move forward to strive to better ourselves and overcome our limitations. This defined all of our history, it’s what’s driven us to build great cities invent new technologies compose great symphonies and works of art to explore the furthest reaches of our planets and to reach for the stars. The potential that exists inside each and every one of us is as unlimited as our imaginations and the heroes that we create to inspire and motivate and guide us reflect the very best aspects of that boundless potential.”

image

The Hero’s Journey - TVTropes.org [X]

Full transcript under the cut. 

(I’m not responsible for any typos or grammatical errors, this is the subtitle text captured with https://anthiago.com/transcript/, I added some para breaks to make it easier to read.)

“ah comic books you’ve got to love them especially in the current year whether it’s reimagining bruce wayne as an asian american teenager accompanied by his gay butler alfred or a body positive wonder woman that strikes fear into the hearts of all you can eat buffets everywhere or whatever these two are meant to be the entire industry seems to have spent the past few years self-destructing i mean reinventing itself into something more diverse and inclusive and what could be more diverse than inclusive than a year novel about the gay goth plus-sized daughter of legendary dc superhero starfire struggling to escape the long shadow cast by her famous mother and find her own sense of identity during her turbulent teenage years it’s a good premise really allowing the writer to explore questions of family legacy personal identity societal expectations the real world implications of fame and the complex and often difficult relationship between mothers and their teenage daughters so let’s take a look at this exciting new work shall we

[Music] 

it does prompt a few questions though like why does her upper lip project several inches from her face why does one of her hands seem to be suffering from chronic gigantism why does this front cover look like it was drawn by me after several pints of methylated spirits i thought the whole point of ya novels is that they’re intended for well young adults so they’re supposed to look cool edgy sexy and compelling this looks like the kind of thing your weird hippie aunt would get you for christmas when you’re five years old and you’d politely dump in some cupboard and never talk about again is there a reason the author might have chosen to style her main character like this well let’s take a look at her shall we [Laughter] now call me crazy but i do detect a faint resemblance here 

the thing is it would be easy enough for me to point and laugh at what’s clearly just another cringe-worthy self-insertion vanity project doomed to fall into the garbage can of history written by an author whose ego probably outstrips her creative ability and commissioned by a struggling publisher desperate to appeal to a woke audience that probably should have allocated its declining resources to something with a better chance of success like burning money i could do all of these things and probably have a good laugh along the way but really the bigger question that comes to mind for me is what exactly are we becoming if this is the new standard for our comic book heroes 

See we’ve been doing this kind of thing for a lot longer than you might think in fact ever since us humans have been able to conceive of stuff beyond our own experience we’ve been kind of fascinated by the idea of heroic characters embarking on epic adventures righting wrongs and defeating evil enemies it’s kind of the basis for our whole civilization whether it’s achilles and hector and the iliad or perseus slain medusa or beowulf fighting grendel or saint george killing the dragon you could pick basically any culture on earth at any time period and the chances are you’ll find legends and stories of heroic men and women accomplishing great deeds characters who could best be described as more than human men of destiny men of great skill or superhuman strength that allows them to overcome the most powerful and terrifying enemies imaginable 

jump forward a few thousand years and we’re still doing the exact same thing with a new generation of heroes and villains that we’ve created all for ourselves the classical heroes gods and monsters from our ancient legends have been replaced by modern day reinterpretations and instead of storytellers spinning their tails around a campfire now we have comic books movies and tv to satisfy our needs the technology might have changed but the basic motivation hasn’t we still have the same drive and hunger for stories of larger than life heroes and villains the same need to believe in things that are grander and bigger than our own petty existence the same aspiration to be more than we are 

and i guess this is the real point i’m trying to make here the heroes we create are a symbol and a reflection of our human potential not human reality they represent the very best of what we can and should strive for they encourage us to reach higher to try harder to go further than we ever thought possible they push us to see beyond the boundaries and limitations of our everyday lives to dream about what we could be instead of fretting about what we are and perhaps most importantly of all they remind us that there’s still something fundamentally good in all of humanity for all our flaws and our mistakes and our weaknesses 

it’s our ability to pick ourselves up to move forward to strive to better ourselves and overcome our limitations this defined all of our history it’s what’s driven us to build great cities invent new technologies compose great symphonies and works of art to explore the furthest reaches of our planets and to reach for the stars the potential that exists inside each and every one of us is as unlimited as our imaginations and the heroes that we create to inspire and motivate and guide us reflect the very best aspects of that boundless potential 

so i guess it’s kind of sad and disheartening to watch today’s cynical nihilistic mean-spirited attempts to undermine subvert and degrade those same heroes instead of respecting and looking up to them it’s become fashionable to mock and belittle and criticize them as relics of a bygone era or symbols of oppression or discrimination without really understanding what they stood for in the first place people who once looked to our heroes as symbols to aspire to as a motivation to become more than they are now see them as an unflattering reflection of their own weaknesses and failures rather than try to better themselves and their lives through hard work courage and sacrifice they instead find perverted joy in tearing down anything that stands higher than them bringing everyone and everything down to their level instead of the harder but more rewarding task of raising themselves up and the end result of this way of thinking is a small petty envious view of the world the kind of thing that belongs in the minds of small petty envious people who hide their dark intent behind a facade of compassion and fairness the kind of people who hysterically preach acceptance of everything no matter how ridiculous harmful or pathetic 

because once you accept everything then there’s no need to strive for anything and instead of the mighty and inspiring heroes we used to look up to well you end up with stuff like this 

now ask yourself who exactly do you think is going to be inspired and motivated by this 

anyway that’s all i’ve got for today go away now”

#the critical drinker    #heroes    #not vc    #relevant    #the heros journey    #tvtropes    #advice    #on writing    #comics    #long post    #cut for length    
I-want-my-IWTV@i-want-my-iwtv
Wed, 06 Apr 2022 12:47:37

headspace-hotel:

headspace-hotel:

thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes

reasons for this:

  • basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.
  • like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why.Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.
  • here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.
  • TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.
  • Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”
  • all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope doesand why its specific characteristics let it do that
  • I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.
  • But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.
  • In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.
  • On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”
  • like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not

An incomplete list of really useful or interesting reads from TvTropes.

please note that yes many of these are concepts that exist elsewhere and a few are even taught in fiction writing classes but TvTropes just does an amazing job at displaying the range of things that can be done with them

legitimately so much of the terminology I use to talk about storytelling, and even think about it in my own head, i learned about from TvTropes

this is just a really short list of examples I encourage people who write or otherwise create stories to browse around on this site it’s so useful

#headspace hotel #tvtropes #resource #really cool #to read 
Untitled@renkayli
Fri, 10 Jun 2022 23:38:31

Image/video enhancement supercut by Duncan Robson.

#television    #enhance    #enhancement    #tvtropes    #tropes    #technology    #bullshit    #mashup    #montage    
News of the unreal@interwebs
Wed, 25 Feb 2015 22:29:27

headspace-hotel:

headspace-hotel:

thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes

reasons for this:

  • basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.
  • like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why.Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.
  • here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.
  • TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.
  • Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”
  • all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope doesand why its specific characteristics let it do that
  • I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.
  • But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.
  • In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.
  • On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”
  • like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not

An incomplete list of really useful or interesting reads from TvTropes.

please note that yes many of these are concepts that exist elsewhere and a few are even taught in fiction writing classes but TvTropes just does an amazing job at displaying the range of things that can be done with them

legitimately so much of the terminology I use to talk about storytelling, and even think about it in my own head, i learned about from TvTropes

this is just a really short list of examples I encourage people who write or otherwise create stories to browse around on this site it’s so useful

#tropes #tvtropes #to read 
here there be dragons@songofsaraneth
Thu, 16 Jun 2022 13:30:42

aqueerkettleofish:

headspace-hotel:

headspace-hotel:

thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes

reasons for this:

  • basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.
  • like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why.Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.
  • here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.
  • TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.
  • Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”
  • all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope doesand why its specific characteristics let it do that
  • I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.
  • But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.
  • In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.
  • On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”
  • like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not

An incomplete list of really useful or interesting reads from TvTropes.

please note that yes many of these are concepts that exist elsewhere and a few are even taught in fiction writing classes but TvTropes just does an amazing job at displaying the range of things that can be done with them

legitimately so much of the terminology I use to talk about storytelling, and even think about it in my own head, i learned about from TvTropes

this is just a really short list of examples I encourage people who write or otherwise create stories to browse around on this site it’s so useful

Also, it’s so fantastically fleshed out and detailed that you can totally get lost in a wikicrawl.

Worth mentioning is that you can look up a piece of media by title, and find a listing of Tropes that it use.

#reblog #tvtropes #literary analysis #yeah its so fucking good 
Aremo Shitai Koremo Shitai Onna no Ko ni Mietatte@lilietsblog
Fri, 10 Jun 2022 00:41:19
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