Trope was one of those words you discovered in your first year of Uni and then abused to within an inch of its life in every piece of assessable writing you had to churn out over the next two years. Why use technique when you can use trope? Why use method when you can use trope? Why use and when you can use trope? I think it goes without saying that my academic essays were torturous literary beings. From Wiktionary:
1. A figure of speech, such as a metaphor, in which a word or phrase is used other than in a literal manner.
5. (literature) Something recurring across a genre or type of literature, such as the ‘mad scientist’ of horror or ‘once upon a time’ as introduction to fairytales. Similar to a cliché, but not necessarily pejorative.
TV Tropes is an – as they always are – terrifyingly detailed wiki that sets out in a very readable, highly interlinked manner all the tropes its various authors have identified in TV, cinema, fiction, games, everyday life and more. Shit be extensive. I’m not going to spend all that long talking about it though, because unless you have the self-discipline of Li-Mu Bai from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (well, that analogy just derailed the sentence) this website will destroy whatever hope you may have had for a productive day. Unless you planned on having an unproductive day, like me. In which case I may as well start running you through my favourite lines from Everybody Loves Raymond, in chronological order. Oh, sorry, that’s right. There weren’t any funny lines in Everybody Loves Raymond. You know what its trope was? Shitness. In my honest and obviously educated opinion, Ray Romano could charitably be described as a tax on the world’s natural resources. Don’t even get me started on Deborah. That paragon of blandness, that succubus of…
Oh. Um. TV Tropes. Enjoy.
/Luke
8 responses so far ↓
1 Taylor // Jul 20, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Luke, you make my heart sing to know that the rest of the world also thinks Everybody Loves Raymond isn’t funny!!
2 Hel // Jul 21, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Thanks. Because I wasn’t being unproductive enough by jumping on here. Now you give me a link to somewhere else?
Awesome.
Hey, when do we get to see the Tramdalph vid?
3 Luke // Jul 21, 2009 at 12:41 pm
ah yes, tramdalf. it will happen, i assure you. if i have to eat a can of tuna, then paul definitely has to stand in the way of a tram. unfortunately, things have been a bit crazy of late in the somewhat ambitious camp. paul has been doing multiple graveyard shifts and nerds of a feather for JJJ and now also has an internet tv show with the vine to contend with. and i’ve been in hospital. so, both being productive in our own ways…
4 Hel // Jul 21, 2009 at 4:13 pm
Fair enough.
Glad you’re ok (if that means anything coming from people you have never met! )
I have now wasted around 2 hours on tvtrope.
Not. Good. But then, it’s my last week at job. What will they do, fire me? (It’s my goal to make that joke at least twice a day until I go. So far so good.)
5 Cassie // Jul 21, 2009 at 9:13 pm
Yeah. My media teacher warned me about tvtropes.
My excuse for avoiding that site is the same as my excuse for locking away my copy of the Sims 3, I value my education.
6 Nerdgasm // Jul 21, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Luke, you are a cruel, cruel individual. You have no excuse for linking a potential plethora of blog readers to that temporal crack that is TVTropes.com.
This stuff is worse at draining time then WoW, it is more smart-arse annoying then Wikipedia, and it has more uninvited whiteness bleaching the eyes then English tourists on a beach.
You are a cruel person.
7 anomaly // May 4, 2011 at 1:14 pm
That’s biased. It’s supposed to be an informative and hilarious site. Maybe you’re not a trivia-lover, that’s fine. Just recognize that there are some people that like trivia and tropes.
And I disagree with your view of Raymond too.
8 gry dla dziewczyn // Jul 1, 2011 at 8:38 pm
Strona bycza jednak troche nie jest po ukończona do końca. Jednak pociąga mi się witryna
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