One of the things about TVTropes that I realized with time and ultimately led my opinions of the site to turn is that the site is, as it says, just a listing of “tropes” that show up in fiction often. The thing is, it presents those without critique.

So a lot of the time, what you’ll find is a whole lot of listings about things that pop up in a series, but nothing that really thinks about how these things, as a package, effect the work as a whole. It’s incredibly hard to make a value judgement just based on what you find.

And again, this is a format issue. Any opinions or critique that can be had about a work is usually shuffled into the YMMV tab, because the site has a supposed rule of neutrality. But in practice? It ends up just completely ignoring any dialog around the work in question.

At the end of the day, it’s whatever. I still casually browse the site sometimes. I just feel like it’s general effects on The Discourse have been more negative than positive.

(This thread was inspired by all of the awful, awful garbage I read/watched/played as a teenager because I read the TVTropes page and was like “oh that sounds cool”, and also by my recent visit to the YIIK page, which somehow manages to put a positive spin on that game.)