Tropes Mirror Wiki

(As of: 7 June 2014)

Tropes Mirror Wiki — why a mirror site for TV Tropes?

The original TV Tropes site has this, written right on the front page: "We are not Wikipedia. We're a buttload more informal.  We encourage breezy language and original thought". That's a great concept in theory, and its one that we try to live up to here on the Mirror. Unfortunately, the original TV Tropes wiki has, historically, failed to live up to this glorious ideal in a number of ways.

The moderation is heavy-handed and arbitrary. Pages are permanently deleted, renamed, reclassified, or heavily edited without real reason. Users are often permanently banned arbitrarily, often for expressing unpopular opinions and not because they are breaking the rules. All on a wiki that is supposedly built on "consensus building" and "the will of the tropers".

Granted, it's their site and they can run it any way they want, but when your guide-words are supposedly "we're not Wikipedia" and that you "encourage breezy language", it sort of behooves you to not act like the Wikipedia moderators act, and to actually encourage the less casual atmosphere.

As with the original site, this wiki is a catalog of "the tricks of the trade for writing fiction". Tropes are, as noted elsewhere, literary devices that writers rely upon to get common images and ideas across. They are things the audience already recognizes, even if they don't know they recognize them. They aren't necessarily cliche's, though they can be used as such sometimes. And we exist, like the site we are mirroring, to present those tropes in an entertaining and fun manner.

Welcome aboard!