Website / TV Tropes

Hi there! Nice of you to drop by our own page!

Regular visitors here won't need to read the introduction.

If you're not a regular here, TV Tropes is a wiki documenting, in a fairly informal manner, the various conventions of fiction. Our full history can be found on our Timeline page.

Of course, like any sizable work, we've collected our own fair share of tropes.

TV Tropes Tropes:

• Accentuate the Negative:
  • Some tropers just can't seem to resist complaining about stuff they don't like here, despite it being against wiki policy. Not to mention the fact that TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life. Thankfully, there have been quite some movements to lower such negativity in this wiki.
  • TV Tropes Reviews. This has caused there to be more negative reviews than positive on some examples. It seems almost like those with negative opinions will be more likely to post a review. It was even pointed out that negative reviews get more attention than positive ones, and this wiki was no exception.^note Commenting on a review will push it back up to the top of the of the Latest Reviews index.
  Advertisement:
  • Darth Wiki has a reputation of this due to Dethroning Moment of Suck, Wall Banger^note before it was purged from the wiki, and So Bad, It's Horrible. Not to mention, TV Tropes already ruined your life.invoked
• Ad Dissonance: Ad of Win and Ad of Lose document the vast spectrum of the quality of ads on this wiki.
• Alice and Bob: They are often used to demonstrate a trope. To list all the tropes that involve them would be too long; see their trope page for details.
• Alien Geometries: The Inverted Trope example on PlayingWith.Mile Long Ship. How exactly do you get a ship whose length is a negative number?
• Alt Text: This wiki does have Alt Text capabilities, in the form of the Pot Hole.
• Ambiguous Syntax:
  • The wiki itself has a few, many of which are chronicled in "I Thought It Meant..." For example, a Serial-Killer Killer: A killer of serial killers, or a serial killer of killers? (Both, more often than not.)
  Advertisement:
  • An example rightly documented in Funny.TV Tropes:
    From the Peanuts Headscratchers page:
    Jesus, Lucy, Violet, and Patty are CRUEL to poor Charlie Brown! They expect him to get an over-commercialized tree, made of pink aluminum? Charlie brings back a tree that looks like one that would be next to the humble manger, and they all laugh at him! Even damned SNOOPY! Although it sets up a Crowning Moment Of Awesome with the "That's what Christmas is all about" speech, I just want to wring those three bitches' neck!!
    Is it bad that I read the start of this entry as a list of 4 names, rather than an expletive and 3 names?

    Jesus is laughing at Charlie Brown for having a great Christmas spirit! The irony!

    Nope. I did it, too. As did my parents, Ayn Rand and God.

    Your parents are Ayn Rand and God?
• And That's Terrible:
  • Tropers will say this as a reaction to things they disapprove of and Pothole it to the And That's Terrible page. And That's Terrible.
  • This wiki’s edit page.
    "Please be cool when you edit. Rudeness is not cool."
• Anthropomorphic Personification: Trope-tan is the personification of TV Tropes itself.
• Appeal to Obscurity:
  • From the Genghis Khan page: After a long list of conquered nations, it reads, "Khwarezm? You've never heard of that country? Exactly."
  • Similarly Trivia.X's Vaporware entry consists of, "What Xbox port of X3: Reunion? Exactly."
• Archive Trawl:
  • The random button can have this effect.
  • Arguably, the reason that this wiki is so addictive. One page will only get you for half an hour, but the 50 pages that are linked that you opened...
  • Think back (or look at your history, whichever is easier). Odds are your coming to this page was a result of this trope.
• Arc Words: Technically, the entire wiki is made up of them. But among the most notable ones are "There Is no Such Thing as Notability", "Tropes Are Tools", and of course "a".
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: You'll find some of this occasionally across this wiki, many of which are Potholed to the main page, including the name of the trope.
• The Artifact: The "deadpan" in Deadpan Snarker. Due to Trope Decay, a deadpan delivery is no longer part of the trope.
• Artifact Title:
  • It started with TV (Buffy the Vampire Slayer in particular). Nowadays it encompasses all media.
  • The Permanent Red Link Club was called that because all links that were listed there were doomed to be permanently red. Now that links show up as blue as long as an article of a given title exists in any namespace, several PRLC members, most commonly subpages and former Main namespace redirects, are actually blue.
• Author Appeal: The whole point of this wiki. Tropers write about whatever they happen to be interested in.
• Awesome, but Impractical: This wiki has a search toolbar for Firefox. While initially it seems like it would ruin your life even further and be great to edit articles, it's much faster to just use the search bar at the top of the page or just Google "TVTropes" rather than use the dropdown menu and enter it.
• Beige Prose: The Laconic Wiki uses as few words as possible; in particular, the Laconic entries on Beige Prose and the Laconic Wiki itself.
• Blatant Lies:
  • On most pages warning of unmarked spoilers, the majority of the spoilers are marked anyway.
  • This trope is most definitely not a popular pothole target for lies.
• Bold Inflation: Repeatedly Used On This Very Wiki, especially in emotionally charged subpages like Awesome Moments or Nightmare Fuel. Articles that use Bold Inflation:
  • A Mech by Any Other Name
  • Fun with Acronyms
  • Lousy Alternate Titles
  • Bold Inflation
  • invoked Most trope pages with a "Don't do this" disclaimer at the end of the intro - this tends to show up on YMMV tropes, or tropes that shouldn't have Real Life examples.
  • This also tends to show up on pages with unmarked spoilers, to warn readers of just that.
  • Any time we mention BRIAN BLESSED, Captain Gordon, Defender of Earth!, or CIAPHAS CAIN, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM! - all of whom receive such treatment from many of their adoring fans.
  • Perhaps most inexplicably, tropes themselves will be bolded sometimes, as if that means it applies harder for some reason.
  • The pages on the manga, and the anime for Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee all emphasize Heart, because Heart Is an Awesome Power.
• Bowdlerise: After The Second Google Incident, commands from the advertising that keeps the site afloat mandates that this wiki either eliminate trope pages for more sexually explicit works or find new (much less family friendly) sources of funding. A number of works the sexual explicitness of which is debatable (most prominently Lolita, which has since been restored, and It, which does feature underage copulation in one scene but otherwise contains little explicit sexual content) have been caught in the mass deletions. Many of the Sexual Harassment and Rape Tropes also presented problems, which resulted in less problematic trope names and a major cleanup effort.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: There's an example in the description of this trope on this wiki.
  "[K]nights have declined in popularity, but the Knight Errant is still around in full force — instead of knights, they are now often cowboys, samurai, or Samurai Cowboys."
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick:
  • One would be a line that goes rather abruptly and disturbingly like this (fictional example): "Japan is well known for anime, J drama, J music, hard working people and so on. But this wasn't always so. It used to be a common act to disembowel people, eat dead babies and such." Go on, say you haven't seen an example like this before!
  • Alternately, on the above links: Main Entry, Quotes, Sugar Wiki, Wild Mass Guessing, invokedNightmare Fuel...
  • Also, from page to page, article-article-article-A Date with Rosie Palms-Cold-Blooded Torture...
• Breaking the Fourth Wall/Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • An editor of the site will often introduce themselves as "This Troper". This is frowned upon for examples. So are That Troper and The Other Troper.
  • There are a handful of articles that make a point of addressing the reader directly, such as Big Brother Is Watching You and The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You.
• British Accents: This trope falls victim to itself, as many non-Brits confuse "British" with "English". Mention of the other three nationalities (Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish) prevents it from being a complete facepalm. Not to mention actually mistaking a Scotsman, Welshman, or Irishman for "English" can lead to... unpleasantness.
• Buffy Speak:
  • The Thing That Goes "Doink".
  • Swirly Energy Thingy.
• Butt-Monkey: Did you ever add an example to this very wiki that was already there? Nothing to be ashamed of, this can happen to the best (especially if it was filed under a different namespace than you would have defaulted it to). Did you shamefully revert the edit on the spot? Great, you saved the mods some work. (beat) Did the Edit Protip say to check if the example is already there?
• Cannot Convey Sarcasm: Absolutely. One can never, ever, ever tell when a troper is being sarcastic or snarky. Such is the monumentally difficult task of communicating sarcasm through text alone.
• Captain Obvious:
  • Tropers will pothole a word, phrase, etc. that is considered to be... well... completely obvious, to the Captain Obvious page.
  • "Five hats means that five tropers think it is ready to publish." At least partially obvious.
  • Also, the Captain Obvious page is about a trope which highlights easily discovered events that are pointed out to the audience, as if they had no clue what was going on. This trope is called "Captain Obvious" and it's on the website you're currently on called TVTropes (the url address is http://www.tickleme.info/). On a side note, TV Tropes is a webpage which features articles about multiple tropes seen throughout many forms of media, such as literature, live-action T.V. shows, anime/manga, video ovo188, comic books, and in several cases, even real life!
  • Any disambiguation page that says it's a disambiguation page.
• Cluster F-Bomb:
  • The fucking Cluster F-Bomb page. The "so much you can't take them seriously" variant was used in a previous version of that page's introduction, but most of it was removed for the sake of clarity. Readers curious as to how bad it was can always check the page history.
  • Amusingly, there are enough fucking example on the Precision F-Strike page that it's turned into a Cluster F-Bomb. Even the haiku page has over five people who just wrote fuck seventeen fucking times.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: In the current version, the normal wiki has a blue header, WMG has a yellow one, Sugar Wiki has brown, and Darth Wiki has black.
  • In previous versions, the normal wiki had a white background with a blue header, YMMV and WMG had a blue one, Sugar Wiki had pink and Darth Wiki had black.
• Color Contrast: Blue Links and Red Links, to signify links that leads somewhere, and links that don't.
• Congestion Speak: The "unabridged version" gag from Laconic.Working Through The Cold reads "Do you thick a bere *cough* illdess is goig to *sniff* stop be frob visitig the udabridged versiod?! ACHOO!".
• Cool Shades: Sign up for the forums and you can post a Cool Shades smiley!
• Cosmetic Award: Made of Win. Unless someone tries to collect those free hugs, anyway.
• Creator Provincialism: At times.
  • Uses of phrases like "our part of the world" and so on, especially when used to contrast with other cultures and nations, reveal the assumptions of the troper responsible. Usually involves We All Live in America or other Western perspective and neglects the existence of non-Western audiences or tropers.
  • The seasonal sub-indexes of Anime and Manga of the 2010s assume the Northern Hemisphere's seasons are used.
  • Go count how many times 9/11 is mentioned under Harsher in Hindsight.
• The Crime Job: Train Job
• Cross-Referenced Titles:
  • Jack-of-All-Trades and Master of None.
  • Hello!, My Name Is Inigo Montoya, You Killed My Father, Prepare to Die
• Crunchtastic:
  • Anvilicious
  • Stripperiffic
  • Troperrific
  • invokedNarmtastic and Narmtacular.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!:
  • The forums: Most forums use BB Code, while the TV Tropes forum uses wiki markup.
  • See those buttons at the top of the page? Sometimes, during a site update, they get rearranged. Then you find yourself sending a private message when you want to see a trope's history page.
  • Sometimes an announcement comes up as a banner at the top of the page, but it only appears some of the time. Most of the time it's not a big problem but if you're wandering the site with the random page button, and the banner is there and suddenly it goes away, shifting the rest of the site up, you'll end up suddenly hitting a dead-end at your profile page and having to go back. Different parts of the site have different buttons anyway.
  • All of us wiki addicts know the frustration of going to a non-wiki site and finding an incorrect bit of info, or grammar error, or something that could have been phrased better and realizing that there is no "edit" feature on the site.
• Dark World: Darth Wiki is where all the negative opinions go to. And a couple of other dark stuff.
• Deadly Hug: The picture for the trope Mercy Kill features a very emotional version of a deadly hug.

• Déjà Vu: Any time the same example is listed twice on the same page, the reader might realize that they've read the example before.
• Demoted to Extra:
  • This website started out as a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan forum.
  • Satsuki from Tsukihime is the center of invokedthe meme "Isn't it Sad, Sacchin". What makes Satsuki's lucklessness worth a section here, is that it even extends here, on TV Tropes. This trope was originally named "Isn't It Sad", after the meme in question. With the wiki's shift to less esoteric titles, Sacchin was—you guessed it—demoted in importance once again. She has since been demoted again; for a while, she was still the page's image, but she's since been replaced. Really, the only reason the Demoted to Extra page isn't a Self-Demonstrating Article is because putting it on the appropriate index would be a Promotion FROM Extra.
  • When a character-named trope has its name changed here, it can end up demoting that character from star to being just another example. For instance, Spike is now just one more instance of invokedBadass Decay instead of being the defining instance of "Spikeification". Nor let us forget Wesley Crusher, former trope namer for Creator's Pet.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Among other things, this very page...
  • The results of this Google search of TVTropes.
  • Every now and again, some unsuspecting editor will add an example to a trope page without checking to see if that page contains an example from that series already. If it does (especially if the example itself is repeated), that page becomes an example of this trope, albeit usually only temporarily.
    
    Not just in posts, either: 1: go to the top of this page. 2: Click "go to watchlist" (need to be a known troper) 3: Look at the top. You should see a button that says "recently new."
    
    And then when people find out, instead of removing it, they tend to Natter on about it. Or they explain everything that was already stated a second time because they think the first guy got something wrong.
    
    I just move the two examples next to each other. Especially when the later one asks why this example hasn't been mentioned yet.
    
    The inverse also happens. On a page for a show, a trope with multiple names may be listed twice. For example, ever since they started calling it Hilarious in Hindsight, it's often seen on a page that also has Reverse Funny Aneurysm. Even worse when someone notices the Reverse Funny Aneurysm example and renames it without realizing there's already a Hilarious in Hindsight example.
  • Some examples from Overly-Long Gag also definitely qualify. And anything on Broken Record invokes this by default.
  • Sometimes people Pot Hole a link to the page the link is on, thus. Presumably, they Cut N' Pasted the text from another page, and forgot to edit out the link.
  • Some Works have Fan Works pages, and due to the presence of Recursive Fanfiction with their own pages, there exists a Fan Works page for Fan Works.
  • TV Tropes: Repeatedly Used on This Very Wiki.
    
    Frank Miller loves repetition.
    
    invokedC-C-C-C-C-Combo Breaker!!
    
    Frank Miller really loves repetition. invokedAnd whores.
    
    xkcd once referenced us.
    
    It hurts, Ness... It hurts...
    
    it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts
    
    People die if they are killed.
    
    Does anyone read Edit Tip #6? "Be sure (your) example isn't here already."
    
    Kyon-kun, denwa!
    
    DESTROY US ALL!
    
    We've entered an endless recursion of time.
    
    Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness...
    
    Inertia is a property of matter.
    
    Blink invokedand you die.
    
    I'm gonna get these muthafuckin' snakes off this muthafuckin' plane!
    
    The penis is evil!
    
    IN SPACE!!!
    
    These are what we call the 'YMMV items.' Things that some people find in this work.
    
    Does anyone read Edit Tip #6? "Be sure (your) example isn't here already."
    
    Kyon-kun, denwa!
    
    The trope names for Tsurime Eyes and Tareme Eyes (the "me" in both means "eyes"). Lampshaded on said trope pages.
    
    For some reason, several pages on this very wiki have links to themselves. Occasionally the very first words on a work's page.
    
    There's also an annoying tendency to have a phrase like "Of course, Your Mileage May Vary" added to the end of examples on pages devoted to YMMV examples.
  • Since TV Tropes introduced namespaces, some page names are this. Films with "film"/"movie" in the title, comic books and strips containing "comic", wikis, blogs...
  • Nowadays, most pages are sorted by media. But in some cases, you have an example in e.g. the film folder, obviously linking to a page in the film namespace, which still mentions that work X is indeed a film. Justified when it's The Artifact from a time when the page wasn't sorted and the page not yet namespaced.
  • This wiki has a page on itself. You're reading it.
  • There's a redirect to Department of Redundancy Department titled "Redundancy Department of Redundancy".
• Dissimile:
  • The Dissimile Page. Incidentally, the line at the top of that page originally was this: "To put it another way, a Dissimile is just like Super Punk Octo Pudding Gas Mark Seven, except without the super punks, the octo pudding, or the gas, and its not the seventh version of anything." In that regard, it's exactly like Super Punk Octo Pudding Gas Mark Seven, so we needed to change it...
  • Cricket Rules
  • "L" Is for "Dyslexia" (the page header quote)
  • Real-Person Fic (page quote)
  • On the character page for Shadow of the Colossus, Malus is described as being "similar to a lighthouse. What with its seaside location, glowing bangles and probably being able to sink an entire fleet of ships."
  • Entry Pimps may do this to shoehorn their favourite work into an example of a trope. Typically accompanied by enough Weasel Words to be its own Lampshade Hanging.
• "Double, Double" Title: If a work with a Protagonist Title receives a Character Sheet, and then the protagonist has so many tropes they get split into their own page, this usually happens. An example would be SpongeBob SquarePants: SpongeBob SquarePants, which repeats the name "SpongeBob SquarePants" twice due to it being both the name of the show and the name of the character.
• Double Standard: Happens sometimes though most tropers try to keep it to a minimum. A good example would be how often Male Frontal Nudity is linked to pages like Squick or Fan Disservice while female nudity goes to Fanservice.
• Dramatic Reading: This guy and friends do dramatic readings of this very wiki, mainly Troper Tales.
• Drinking Game: We have one.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • This very wiki used to list normal, YMMV, Flame Bait and Trivia examples all together on work pages until mid-2010. After that there was a period of a few weeks where both YMMV and Flame Bait examples were completely banned from work pages and could only be listed on trope pages, but it quickly became obvious that this wasn't going to work out and resulted in the current format of separate YMMV (and later Trivia) pages, with Flame Bait examples staying restricted to the trope pages (and sometimes not even being allowed there either). We used to have Troper Tales on this site too, but we prefer not to talk about that.
  • There are a number of troper practices and memes that were once very common, but have since become rarer or even outright banned due to tightening standards. For instance, many trope pages would point out an example from a particularly old work, noting that it "makes this one of The Oldest Ones in the Book". This phrasing was once so common that later uses of it would simply Pot Hole the phrase "makes this..." (or similar) to The Oldest Ones in the Book, on the assumption that everyone would be familiar with what that "made this". Eventually the problem was solved by turning the page into an index of various time periods where tropes originated; with more pages to link to, it became less of a meme to link to them in general.
  • Some early versions of TV Tropes pages had a lot more zero-context examples than they do now. One example of this is the page on The Simpsons; the old version of the page had several examples with zero context or only barely any context at all, while the current version of the page describes the trope examples with more depth.
  • Meanwhile, because of the sheer size of TVT as it goes further into the 21st century, it's possible and perhaps even not uncommon to find pages dedicated to older and less prominent works that still contain examples of several of the above issues - out of place YMMV tropes are uncommon due to an internal flagging system that indicates their presence, but are still not completely unknown; wild trivia tropes are somewhat more common, and contextless example entries can still pop up quite often on pages concerning media prior to 2010.
• Epigraph: This wiki, far too many times.
• Episode Finishes the Title: The So You Want To namespace.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Some of our trope titles.
• Exact Words: On the page for Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, the description of the game says that it "features never-before-seen freedom", which it does indeed — there is no collision detection (in other words, you can go through any object except the ground), no angle detection (allowing you to drive vertically), and drive straight off the map.
• Face Palm:
  • Some editors in this wiki tend to use this at times as a reaction... and Pothole it to the Face Palm page.
  • Previously in the wiki's history, if a certain show/video game/comic/etc. had its own Wall Banger or DMOS page, odds were an image of one of the characters facepalming would be the page image. Due to the Wall Banger pages being cut and the images on the DMOS pages being removed due to lack of informativity, this is no longer present.
• Failure Is the Only Option: Anything listed on the Permanent Red Link Club is basically this. If a trope or page gets so misused, become a magnet for racial slurs and personal attacks, and the like; and the page cannot be fixed, the entire page (and in some occasions, the entire trope) will be deleted and is never to be used again. Forever.
• False Reassurance: On the Wretched Hive page:
  Limerick has often been named Stab City. Though in recent years the number of stabbings has decreased, as gun crime has gone through the roof.
• Forced Meme:
  • Occasionally someone tries to sneak his or her idea for a meme on to a page, sometimes going so far as to interfere with other entries to force them into the limelight.
  • Also occurs in the naming of tropes. It's a very real debate in the forums, from time to time, whether the purpose of this wiki includes promoting specific fan-speak terms so as to become recognized across all fandoms.
  • Following the same principle, occasionally it happens that the creator of some fan-work writes a trope page for their work themselves. This isn't bad on its own, but in some cases it is incredibly obvious that the page would not have been written if not for the creator's own ego.
• For Your People, By Your People: By fans, for fans.
  • The TV Tropes webseries Echo Chamber states in its credit roll that it is "Created for Tropers, by Tropers."
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Some page descriptions, such as Demonic Possession.
• Funetik Aksent: Some tropes on this wiki are this, such as Vampire Vords and The Ahnold.
• Fun with Acronyms:
  • The The Archive of Bellicose Lexicon Entities, or TABLE, and all of its entries.
  • invokedProbably unintentional, but there is the "Truth in Television" page...
  • Another accidental example, now that the trope originally called Takahashi Couple has finally settled on the name "Belligerent Sexual Tension", try combining it with the more-established "Unresolved Sexual Tension" to create a single phrase.
• Fun with Autocensors:
  • The forums filter "tl;dr" to "laconic version:". In the past they filtered it to "Sorry, I skipped some posts.", and earlier it was “I am too lazy, or possibly too incapable, to actually read anything. I resent the fact that this makes me seem like an inconsiderate person and hereby pledge to resume taking my ADHD medication.” It had to be changed because often the original post ended with "tl;dr: summary of the post", so "tl;dr" had two possible meanings.
  • There's also one word ("titular") that is currently completely filtered out because of perceived overuse.
• Fun with Palindromes:
  • Trope Report.
  • invokedIt's also noted on the Technology Marches On page that the lack of home stereo systems these days makes the ever popular palindrome "If I had a hi-fi" a somewhat dated palindrome.
• Furry Reminder: The Just for Fun page for the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Show Within a Show Daring Do, from the PoV of hypothetical online ponies. Furry Reminders abound; for example, vegetation in the wilderness is filed under Food Porn.
• Gaslighting: This can happen non-maliciously (or perhaps maliciously) when editing this wiki. You could write the outline of a paragraph at the top of the page, work on a different part of the document, and then come back to find the paragraph fleshed out by someone else, or even deleted without a trace.
• A Good Name for a Rock Band: Ron the Death Eater, according to Rainbow Dash.
• Going Mobile: This wiki has mobile apps for the iPhone and the Android.
• Gotta Catch Them All: This wiki itself is one of tropes and archetypes from both fiction and nonfictional sources, whose success will have an unknown significant meaning for the universe!
• Grammar Nazi: Yes, if someone makes edits with egregiously bad grammar, it may be grounds for a suspension. That's fair, though, since the alternative is a wiki with sloppy English.
• Gratuitous Animal Sidekick: Tropey the Wonder Dog.
• Gratuitous Foreign Language: On the Trope Epitaph page, the "Here lies [X]" part is translated into non-English concepts' respective languages. For example, "Här ligger Stockholm Shnozzing", "Hic iacet Parvum Opus", and "Twinkle Toes Samurai ga koko ni nemuru".
• Gratuitous Japanese: A lot less than previously, given a conscious effort since the site began to make trope names more accessible and obvious, however a number of tropes (e.g. Yandere) are still principally referred to by Japanese words for anime character stereotypes that simply don't make sense unless one is already immersed in the culture - either through lack of desire to change them, or simply because there's no better consensus term that's been agreed upon.
• Gratuitous Latin: Can there be any reason besides this trope that the main page has a Latin version?
• Great Big Book of Everything: This wiki strives to be one. Compared to The Other Wiki, it is still in its infant stages, but, as There Is no Such Thing as Notability, it's definitely catching up.
• Guide Dang It!: It’s not uncommon for beginner tropers to think of a trope idea that probably exists but have no idea what it’s called. The fact that many trope names don’t hint at the general concept adds to the confusion.
• Head Desk: Some editors tend to use this at times as a reaction... and pothole it to the Head Desk page.
• Hive Mind: A conscious goal. (See also Edit Tip #1.)
• Hold Your Hippogriffs: This wiki will sometimes alter trope names to fit the work that the page is dedicated to, especially the Just for Fun page for Daring Do, where all the tropers are supposed to be sentient horses, zebras, griffons, etc.

• Hurricane of Euphemisms:
  • The opening to the Deus Sex Machina and Band of Brothels articles.
  • And No Periods, Period.
• Hurricane of Puns: Naturally, this wiki has plenty of examples. Just read the Just for Pun index. The Sorting Algorithm of Tropes index also qualifies, although the puns will likely slip under your radar if you don't have a computer science background.
• Hydra Problem: Typically, reading about one trope will lead you to others, which in turn will lead you to others, which in turn lead you to others still...
• Hypocritical Humor: Due to issues with the use of snowclones like "Everything's Better with [whatever]" for trope names, such as with clarity or narrative significance, a policy was created to prevent their creation, and several were renamed or cut. The policy's name? Everything's Worse with Snowclones.
• I Can't Believe It's Not Heroin!: This wiki, see TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life for examples.
• I Just Like Saying the Word: One word gets used egregiously on this wiki.
• Incoming!: Incoming Ham
• Insistent Terminology: The wiki has a few. For example, British television show Doctor Whos main character (other than the companions, according to Word of God) is named "The Doctor" as is Star Trek: Voyagers holographic doctor who never settled on a proper name for himself. Any reference to "The Doctor" of Voyager will be followed by "no not that Doctor."
  • For years, this wiki insisted on using the word "Fora" instead of "Forums". That was eventually dropped.
• Internet Mimic: It isn't hard to spot a regular troper in an internet forum. Use of phrases or expressions common on this website but uncommon in the real world will work their way into posts with an improbably high density, revealing their true colors to any other Tropers who happen to be browsing the forum.
• In the Style of: The wiki itself has written the summary of A Case of Spring Fever in the style of a horror story.
• Irony: The fact that TV Tropes documents tropes found in popular culture, and has its own page (which you are currently reading) dedicated to tropes that apply to the website.
• I Warned You: The You Have Been Warned page (which is more of a Cassandra Truth), or pot-holing text to Shmuck Bait.
• I Would Say If I Could Say: Mod Madrugada's forum signature sometimes is, "If I had a piece of chalk, I'd work it out on a wall, if I had a wall." She took it from the third book n P.C.Hodgell's Chronicles of the Kencyrath series, Seeker's Mask. The context is Jame, the heroine trying to sort out how she's related to another character, in a culture that places a great deal of importance on blood relationships.
• Jekyll & Hyde: Sugar Wiki and Darth Wiki.
• Jenny's Number: The stardate in the trope The Kirk is 8675309.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: invoked This wiki has a fake entry that is a parody of this trope's prevalence in the anime fandom: supposedly, Ichiban no Tempura is a Cult Classic that was only aired in Japan once, and all those who pirated the tapes died mysterious deaths, so only the most hardcore otakus know of its existence. The truth is that no such anime exists.
• Lampshade Hanging: For pages about tropes, there will a folder section for TV Tropes, lampshading how TV Tropes uses the trope explained on the page in some fashion. Very meta. Even more meta is the logo.
• Lampshade Wearing: The logo wears one over the second "t", unless it's changed for a holiday.
• Large Ham Title:
  • BRIAN BLESSED. Back in the days when the wiki still had formatting tools for increasing font size, the unspoken rule was that Mr. Blessed's name always be at least one size larger than the surrounding text. Nowadays, his name is still automatically spelled out in CAPS, and it's common practice to use BOLD TYPE for his name.
  • All instances of Ciaphas Cain are to be followed with HERO OF THE IMPERIUM.
  • The same goes for CAPTAIN GORDON, DEFENDER OF EARTH! and Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer!
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: In the Badge Shop. A TARDIS? Ha ha, no, it's just a regular police box, silly.
• The Legend of X: The Legend of Chekhov
• Let's See YOU Do Better!: The Trope Wiki was founded as a Start My Own version of this very wiki because one of the Admins of TV Tropes challenged the founder of the Trope Wiki with the line, "If you think you can do better, then let's see you try." So he did. (As of the end of September, 2014, that domain is unclaimed; that mirror wiki has died or moved away to parts unknown. Possibly Cleveland.)
• Lighter and Softer: Sugar Wiki, where all the positive opinions go to.
• Logic Bomb: Some tropes seem to contradict each other, such as for example There Are No Girls on the Internet and Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls, It Always Rains at Funerals and It's Always Sunny at Funerals, or Trailers Always Spoil and Never Trust a Trailer. They do not form paradoxes, however, since tropes are not logical truths.
  
  Firstly, tropes generally hold for one or more works ^note (here, "works" is meant in the widest sense possible, including memes and general attitudes: the first pair above are about memes) and it is understood that they do not necessarily hold anywhere else (which is why we have example lists): the trope XIsY is almost always shorthand for "it can be non-trivially observed that in some works, X is Y".
  
  Next, even when looking into those works where the trope appears, it may reflect anything from fictional "fact" (X is indeed Y) to tendency, possibly subverted in a twist (X tends to be Y, but whoops) to belief (X is held to be Y, at least by one character).
  
  Sometimes we make an example of a work because it averts X is Y, and that's still not paradoxical. In the Real Life sections of tropes, or in the case of a trope that deals with the real world (as the last pair in the list above does) contradictions could suggest a possible paradox, but most such can be explained by (acceptable) vagueness and bias.
• Major General Song: The page on the topic itself counts as a partial one. Anyone want to write a full-length version for the site?
  • This wiki also has one for the works of the Walt Disney Company called Friends and the High Council.
• Media Watchdog: In bowing to the requests from Google for censorship in order to stay connected to their ad server, Tv Tropes itself has become a watchdog, complete with a council to evaluate works and tropes against a content policy.
• Medium Awareness: References to how the site is a wiki are constantly referenced.
• Military Rank Names: This wiki has Captain Geographic, Captain Patriotic, Captain Ethnic—you get the idea.
• Mind Screw:
  • At least half the entries in Wild Mass Guessing.
  • The Third-Person Person page. How many of the Real Life entries are posted by the person they speak of?
• Minimalism: Laconic Wiki uses this style, making normally verbose pages easier to understand.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: I Eat Metaphor For Breakfast and What Year Is This? being sent to TRS → massive epidemic of Trope Decay involving stock phrases as trope names.
• Moe Anthropomorphism: Trope-tan
• Monkeys on a Typewriter: Twitch Plays Pokémon is described in its page quote on this wiki as tens of thousands of monkeys fighting over one typewriter, half of them desperately trying to progress in the game and the other half throwing shit everywhere.
• Mood Whiplash: The pages here vary from lighthearted and silly to dark and depressing. It's easy to click a potholed link, and end up on a page where the tone is the complete opposite from the one you were previously at.
  • The So Bad, It's Horrible page. At one moment, you'll be giggling at the snarky descriptions of hilariously bad attempts at entertainment or truly pathetic fanfiction, and at the next moment reading about the dangers of hazardous toys and rides, and the harm those things have induced on innocent kids.
• Move Along, Nothing to See Here: Used on the Recent Changes page when the database isn't working.
• Muppet Cameo: This wiki is fond of Statler and Waldorf.
  Statler: Well, they got something right for once. We are the best of the Muppets.
  Waldorf: That's not exactly a high mark to reach, is it?
  Both: Do-ho-ho-ho-hoh!
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: Some editors in tend to use this at times...and Pothole it to the My Friends... and Zoidberg page.
• Name McAdjective: Awesome Mc Cool Name.
• Nature Tinkling:
  • In the Toilet Paper Substitute's Playing With page, Alice pees (or poops) outside.
  • Bob pees outside in the Playing With page for Jaywalking Will Ruin Your Life.
• Network Decay:
  • Despite the name, this site no longer focuses on television. It's added movies, books, board ovo188 and video ovo188 to its lineup. Lately, it's even been moving away from tropes, adding Useful Notes, Audience Reactions, Trivial Facts, writer's tools, humor pages, and with a few exceptions, Real Life examples and material. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. What's happened here is more expansion than decay; since we're not dealing with a finite number of time slots, we didn't have to remove any of the original material to make room for the new stuff. Given that most TV tropes originated in literature, mythology, and theater, such expansion makes sense. It gives perspective on the tropes.
  • Troper Tales and Fetish Fuel were big examples within the site itself. They were originally intended to be examples of tropes in real life, and the ultimate reason for their removal was because they became more of an anonymous blog and discussion forum. See also our own section of invokedWhy Fandom Can't Have Nice Things.
• Never Trust a Title: If it's listed in This Index Is Not an Example, you shouldn't take a page title at face value. If it gets so far out of hand that it only confuses tropers and readers however, this often leads to a rename. Also, it features a lot of tropes found in other media than television...
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • This wiki has a Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment meant to prevent any Flame Wars (read that page for more). Unfortunately in some situations, some tropers completely ignore this rule, leading to the mods locking the page most likely for good... which means nobody gets to add and edit future tropes.
    
    In extreme cases, there's the Permanent Red Link Club, in which the tropes are so misused, become a magnet for racial slurs and personal attacks, and the like that not only the page is locked, the page (and in some occasions, the entire trope) gets deleted, never to be used again. Forever.
    
    And in less extreme but still unfortunate cases, Real Life examples can be cut and prohibited from a page if things get controversial enough. On that note, there's also the Example Sectionectomy, which examples are either cut entirely or relegated to a separate area such as Darth Wiki or the Discussion tab if things get nasty.
    
    And if the examples had previously been divided into multiple pages, then the deleted Real Life examples won't even appear in the page history for you to browse.
  • This is the reason why invokedFetish Fuel and Troper Tales no longer exist. Some people couldn’t resist putting controversial and creepy content in invokedFetish Fuel and Troper Tales, which lead to these sections being sent off to separate off-site wikis.
  • Troper Tales existing in the first place. Troper Tales was only created to keep tropers from writing their own tales on the main wiki. Troper Tales ruined the reputation of TV Tropes and made the website a laughingstock of half the Internet. It was also known for attracting people who wrote stories that sounded creepy, filled with bile; psychotic, racist, sexist material; and ego-stroking. The admins could have either warned the tropers or banned them for writing personal tales instead of creating troper tales, since Troper Tales only reinforced the habit.
  • The wiki used to have a "strike format", but it was eventually disabled as people were using it simply to sneak in Take Thats and such. Texts that were previously striked are now hidden texts. However, the strike format is still usable in the forums.
  • Earlier there were "super secret spoilers", which was the equivalent of making the text white. This was also removed in part due to people actually using it for relevant information that reader couldn't see without highlighting the whole page.
  • Headscratchers used to be called "It Just Bugs Me", but was renamed because people kept misinterpreting it as "Why does <insert anything here> suck so much?".
• No Ending: No matter how many links you click on, no matter how many pages you find, there is no end to your search.
• No Fourth Wall: See for example, its Real Life sections and articles.
• Noir Episode: This wiki has a whole page written Film Noir-style here (it also happens to be a guide to writing In the Style of Film Noir).

• No Such Thing as Wizard Jesus: As this wiki will tell you, Jesus was obviously a Time Lord. But then, so is everyone...
• Noun Verber:
  • Trope Namer
  • Noun Verber
  • Ambulance Chaser
  • Face Stealer
  • Emotion Eater
  • Death Seeker
• Obvious Rule Patch: The admin notes on BFG and BFS say not to write "Big Fucking Gun" anywhere in the article. After some Rules Lawyer put "Big Freaking Gun" instead, a second line was added saying, "Obvious Rule Patch: Or 'Big Freaking Gun'. Or 'Frigging'. Or any other such expansion of the acronym." A second patch had to be applied later after another Rules Lawyer added a paragraph Backronyming it.
• Offscreen Inertia: On a lighter note, this trope is the reason why this wiki has the policy of Examples Are Not Recent. When adding an example, most people don't realize that their example will probably stand unchanged for months or even years, and thus has the potential to become very outdated if it says that some development in a work of fiction (or Real Life) is "recent".
• Oh, My Gods!: A few tropers on this wiki have been known to swear by Trope-tan. "Sweet Trope-tan!" "For the love of Trope-tan...."
• Orange/Blue Contrast: Psst... Check out the color scheme on this wiki. Trope-tan.
• Overly Narrow Superlative:
  • The page on Crack Fic describes this as "the greatest work of pornography ever written. About Tetris."
  • The page for Axe Cop calls it the best comic by a six-year-old you'll ever read! As a bonus, This Real Trailer, Fake Movie refers to it as "the greatest action movie ever made...written by a five-year-old boy."
  • The page for Clue calls it "possibly the best movie about a board game ever made in 1985".
  • The article for "the most evil Georgian in human history."
  • The article for "the most evil painter in human history."
  • The article on Dragonball Abridged describes the series as "The most popular Abridged version of DBZ made (so far)."
  • The page for Ghostbusters (1984) refers to it as "the greatest Lovecraftian comedy of the 1980's."
  • In several places, we refer to the line "Exit, Pursued by a Bear" as "the most famous piece of stage direction ever".
• Overused Running Gag: See here.
• Perpetual Beta: Pages are never really 'finished' and there are always new features and changes being made.
• Point-and-Laugh Show: This Troper, a satirical series of dramatic readings by YouTube user CrazyGoggs chronicling the saddest and most disturbing contributions to this wiki, back when we had Troper Tales and invokedFetish Fuel. Its exposés served as a driving force in the eventual deletion of those sections.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: This is the reason that many tropes named after characters got renamed (for example, Bugs Meany Is Gonna Walk to Conviction by Contradiction.)
• Portmanteau: Ask The Tropers displays the time of the "lastest reply", a portmanteau of "last reply" and "latest reply" that means both.
• Portmantitle: Type B.
• Postmodernism: Plenty of examples. Since the site is a catalog of devices used in fiction, the whole site is this.
  • Anytime you see a Meta Example, it's Post-Modern. Especially if it's on the Post-Modernism page. Whoa. Trippy. Further complicating matters is that if you deny that your Post-Modern statement is itself Post-Modern, you've simply made it even more Post-Modern. In particular this makes it very tricky to parody as any sufficiently involved parody of Post-Modernism is, in itself, a Post-Modern comment on itself. No PoMo.^note "Not that I'm postmodern or anything."
  • This article blames Post-Modernism as one of the reasons why TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life, since the style of this wiki references fictions one after the other, and dissolves the boundaries between fiction and Real Life. Besides the lack of notability, the relentless self-referencing of massively interlinked trope definitions with potholes parodying the purpose of every article and invokedturning trope names into Fan Speak (along with the medium of hypertext and the concept of a wiki itself) is also a very post-modern concept.
• Post-Release Retitle: See Renamed Tropes for the long list of trope articles that got retitled after their launch, along with the reasons why.
• Potty Dance: Used in the Playing With page for Accidental Dance Craze.
• Power Of Hate: The Darth Wiki is empowered by hate.
• Precision F-Strike: Tropers will often pothole any usage of the word "fuck" to the Precision F-Strike page.
• Product Placement: While we don't get paid for it, this very wiki is not immune to it, with product names creeping into trope titles—sometimes justified when talking about tropes that have to do with brand names, but often just because. (That last one, in particular, could've easily been made generic.) One company even got two tropes named after it for no apparent reason besides Rule of Funny.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: You'll find this done quite a bit by members of this, which are Potholed to the Punctuated For Emphasis page.
• Pungeon Master:
  • Us. Seriously. Look how many pages that link to Incredibly Lame Pun where the Pot Hole in question is one.
  • Also, the index page Sorting Algorithm of Tropes was clearly written by a Pungeon Master.
  • Just check out the all blue stinger to Psycho Electro.
• Punny Name: Quite a few article titles.
• Pun With Pi: The trope for someone who can calculate pi to a great many places is called Mouthful of Pi.
• Rainbow Speak:
  • Tropers working on pages for the more recent Kamen Rider series have a tendency to work colors into text referring to riders' varying forms. There's a lot of this going around on Super Sentai series pages too.
  • If you think about it, potholes on this very wiki look kind of like this, too, whether the text is blue or red. This includes this line right here.
  • Trope pages dealing with colors used to have this until the color tags were removed, such as Rainbow Motif, Color Character, and Color-Coded Elements. And, as mentioned above, this article right here.
• Random Power Ranking: The Super Weight system on this wiki ranks everyone from most helpless and wimpy damsels in distress and the heaviest of the loads to the mightiest of physical gods and the most liberal users of Author Powers on 8-point scale going from -1 to 7.
• Reality Subtext: The Disney namespace was created in order to differentiate animated adaptations by Disney from those of other production houses; it was removed after Disney's making a habit of producing live-action remakes of animated Disney films caused a variation of the same problem, rendering the namespace useless.
• Recursive Reality: At the amazingly fast rate we're adding tropes to this site (as well as some other stuff), this site will soon contain all the tropes that could possibly exist (and those that can't either). But if we put all the tropes that (don't) exist together, we are, in fact, describing the universe (and, indeed, all possible universes that can and cannot exist), so effectively, this site will contain all the universe within it, including this site! Which, in turn, will contain this site within it, and this site will also contain this site within it, ad infinitum. How's that for a Mind Screw?
• Refuge in Audacity: The header for the page of this trope lists In-Universe Examples Only as a header, even on all the other related sub-pages just to hammer it home. The very first page listed below the header is not only exactly what you think, but its also in bold font with arrows pointing to it, just to draw attention to the obvious violation. This trope is probably the only page listed on the the Administrivia page that also list Real Life examples.
• Revealing Cover-Up: This very wiki sometimes falls into this, through badly placed spoiler tags. For example, if someone apparently dies (only to show up again many issues later), and an article describes it as "her apparent death"... there are very few words that would fit into that spot, and most of them indicate that the person's still around in some sense. So unless we all get into the habit of saying "her real, permanent, not a dream, not a robot, not an imaginary story! death", it's probably best to stick the spoiler at the end, where it could mean any number of things, including things that happened to someone else entirely.
• Reviewer Stock Phrases: On this wiki, it used to be common to find examples that are the "poster child" or "patron saint" of the trope in question.
• Rhetorical Question Blunder: It turns out, if you leave a rhetorical question lying around in an example entry on this wiki, somebody WILL come around and answer it. They're best avoided as bait for violations of the "Repair, Don't Respond" guideline, don't you agree?
  • Oh yes, definitely.
• Ridiculous Procrastinator: If you are reading TV Tropes right now, odds are you're procrastinating. Truth in Television if there ever was such a thing. In fact, most Pot Holes to Ridiculous Procrastinator are not from example pages, or character pages, but from Troper pages. (Bonus points if you are reading this page to procrastinate.) To get over it, put on classic rock album and make your own Hard-Work Montage. U2, Jethro Tull, and Styx are good options. And then listen to it while browsing TV Tropes.
• Running Gag: Several.
• Russian Reversal: Several trope names: Ass Kicks You, Dog Walks You, Bullet Dodges You, The Door Slams You, The Can Kicked Him, and The Game Plays You. Also an alternate title for Too Rare to Trope is "Chairs Sit on People," as opposed to People Sit on Chairs.
• Sarcastic Title: The Just Friends trope is all about characters who, in one way or another, are anything but.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • Think very carefully before clicking on an external link. Especially on the Rickroll articles.
  • Likewise, many of the external links on the invokedNightmare Fuel and Unintentional Uncanny Valley pages are invitations for a creep-out.
  • This very wiki is often this trope when linked from other sites. See TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life.
  • If you see an image link on a page like Black Bra and Panties or Of Corsets Sexy, don't click it if you're at work.
• The Scottish Trope:
  • There is, in fact, a trope that qualifies as The Scottish Trope. Many of you will remember, with either fondness or horror, a certain page on this wiki by the name of I Am Not Making This Up.
  • This now also goes for tropes which have been moved to the Darth Wiki. We'd name some, but they're not supposed to be linked on the main site.
  • Also, Flame Bait tropes, which aren't even allowed in the YMMV tabs anymore.
  • Perhaps this Opera error message◊ sums it up in a somewhat disturbing and/or scary manner. ^note The computer crashed because he had visited the page about The Scottish Trope.
• Seen It All: Anyone who reads this wiki for too long runs the risk of becoming like this. That ship has sailed. With a full crew.
• Self-Demonstrating Article: A whole index of them.
• Semantic Superpower: On this wiki, much of the protagonist of this forum game's power is based on this. At least, until the And Now for Someone Completely Different(?).
• Separated by a Common Language: Sometimes comes up as a result of tropers originating from both sides of the pond. Protocol says that whoever attucks a pig first gets to do so based on their version of English.
• Serious Business: Tropes.
  • Fandom
  • Unless you opened this site and its pages without creating an account and just being silent reader, why are you here, again?
• Shamu Fu: In the forums, one of the generic "thump" messages is "This post was thumped by the Codfish in a Derby Hat".
• Shaped Like Itself:
  • When a pothole is found in a page and leads to the same page.
  • There are also several times where a pothole is just the trope name, except with the caps removed, ex: Suspect Is Hatless as "suspect is hatless". Some tropers work on cleaning those up.
  • TLP entries as well, such as "Gesturing with a Weapon: Somebody gestures at people with a weapon". For that matter, a lot of Exactly What It Says on the Tin articles can sound a bit like this.
  • On this wiki, Star Trek: The Original Series is referred as TOS, and the time it takes place is referred to as the TOS era, or 'the The Original Series era'.
• Shoehorned First Letter: The wiki’s love for Added Alliterative Appeal gets us into trouble now and again; witness Pstandard Psychic Pstance, Psmith Psyndrome, Kafka Komedy, and Vampire Vannabe.
• Shown Their Work: This wiki often falls into research failure, but those are usually corrected. The Useful Notes pages are an obvious example, but one can learn a surprising amount of useful facts just by going on a Wiki Walk here. Now, head over to Television Is Trying to Kill Us, Cowboy BeBop at His Computer, "Common Knowledge", or Artistic License and learn what television doesn't know.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: This very wiki sometimes appears to view The Other Wiki this way, while believing that from the other side it's more like Unknown Rival.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism:
  • Even this wiki invokes this trope. Compare the Sugar Wiki and the Darth Wiki for extremes of both viewpoints.
  • In general, many entries on this site seek to invokeddiscredit hoary or cliched tropes (cynicism) - unless the point is that Tropes Are Not Bad (idealism).
  • How we view the way tropes should be used:
    
    Idealism: Tropes Are Not Bad
    
    Cynicism: Tropes Are Not Good
    
    Realism: Tropes Are Tools
• Sliding Scale Of Silliness Vs Seriousness: On the silly end of the scale. Pretty much every article has at least one joke, with only a few being serious and many being wall to wall laughter.
• Small Reference Pools: Even good ol' TV Tropes can fall foul of this sometimes where examples may be weighted towards a certain media even if the trope itself is common elsewhere.
• Soup Is Medicine: On the "Sick Episode" page, it mentions that characters who are Working Through the Cold would rather have chicken soup, and the laconic version suggests you go back to the unabridged version so that the narrator can bring you some soup.
• Spotting the Thread: At times. That "Super Secret Spoiler" wasn't so Super Secret when some extra white space where there shouldn't be popped up. Due to the YMMV finagle, Super Secret Spoiler has been replaced with the normal spoiler.
  • Averted deliberately by some clever tropers by using completely unnecessary spoiler space or adding innocuous information under spoilers in strategic places, and making spoilers longer.....yes, longer than necessary so their length doesn't give anything away.
• Squirrels in My Pants: Referenced in the Playing With pages for Dancing with Myself and Accidental Dance Craze.
• Straight Man and Wise Guy: This is the Wise Guy compared to the Straight Man that is That Other Wiki, being The Snark Knight in comparison to the more matter-of-fact Wikipedia.
• Sudden Name Change: This very wiki does it with changing names of trope pages all the time.
• Take That!: Some tropers just love to use this. You'll find a bunch of them scattered all over the Wiki, which are Potholed to the main page. Sometimes they get ground down by Wiki Magic, sometimes not. Don't even think about adding to them. Chances are, whatever you have in mind is just not worth including.
  • Trope Names that are Take Thats:
    1. invokedThe Scrappy
    2. invokedThe Chris Carter Effect
    3. Flanderization
    4. Dan Browned
    5. Capcom Sequel Stagnation
    6. invokedX-Pac Heat
    7. invokedMacekre
    8. Fox News Liberal and its redirect, MSNBC Conservative
  • One example that isn't a Pothole or a Trope Name is Godwin's Law's page image, which is a book titled "Everyone I Don't Like is Hitler, a guide to online political discussion". Clicking the image takes you to Reddit.
• Talk Like a Pirate: Time was, the main page were changed ta pirate speak, for Talk Like a Pirate Day. If'n ye should belive in such tales, talk be heard that th'incident be archived yet still somewhar 'pon this very wiki... AND THAR BE A GHOST IN IT or some such.
• Technical Euphemism: Our term for a wet dream is Nocturnal Emission.
• The Tetris Effect: This wiki, to the point where we have two pages dedicated to the phenomenon.
• Theme Naming:
  • Our trope naming organizations, like SPOON, FORKS, KNIVES, and PLATTER, were all named after kitchen utensils.
  • All of the main four Elemental Powers tropes are based on popular metaphors: Playing with Fire, Making a Splash, Blow You Away and Dishing Out Dirt.
• The "The" Title Confusion: This wiki has run into this a few times; "The" is usually omitted from a name unless it is a character type (The Dragon, The Pollyanna) or part of a set phrase (The Blind Leading the Blind). Back when character names were accepted as trope titles, "The" was used to distinguish, say, The Ralph Wiggum (a humorously stupid person) from Ralph Wiggum (the Simpsons character). Pages' search-engine descriptions take such forms as "The The Starscream trope as used in popular culture, with a list of examples from all media." Or better yet, for this page, "The The The Title Confusion trope as used in popular culture, with a list of examples from all media."
• Thrown Down a Well: The Permanent Red Link Club.
• Tinfoil Hat: A guy wearing a tinfoil hat used to be the symbol of the Wild Mass Guessing section.
• Title Drop:
  • Usually occurs in the longer-winded articles. Don't link back to the same article you're Title Dropping, though. That's considered bad formatting. This was even Lampshaded in the I Am Not Making This Up page, as many entries used Pot Holes to the page for no really sensible reason. Now that page is gone. Title Drop with care.
  • On Better Than It Sounds, the Star Wars films get Title Drops rephrased in complicated language.
• Title: The Adaptation:
  • TV Tropes: The Party Game. No, really.
  • The Live Bloginations forum section of this site has a number of "Title: The Liveblog" or variations thereof.
  • Threads in general sometimes get titles like "Subject of the Thread: The Thread."
• Title 1: Subverted on a number of pages. When a page exists for a first game of a series of the same name, the page's title may be "Namespace.Series Installment 1". However, the title should be custom titled to get rid of the "1" unless this trope actually does apply to said work
• Unconventional Alignment: The Stupid axis.
  • Lawful Stupid
  • Chaotic Stupid
  • Stupid Good
  • Stupid Evil
  • Stupid Neutral
• Unknown Rival: This wiki versus Wikipedia (That Other Wiki if you're feeling bitter about it) with TV Tropes as the unknown one.

• Un-person: Tropers who get banned usually have all of their edits reverted and TLP entries deleted.
• "Untitled" Title: The No Title article, which is about untitled works.
• Unusual Euphemism: After someone used it in the Doctor Who invokedFetish Fuel page, the phrase "squiggly feelings" became popular on this very wiki, and, after the Fetish Fuel pages were moved, invokedFetish Fuel Wiki.
• Verbal Tic: This very wiki, natch.
  • Flat "What"
  • And how!
  • Some of these are particularly egregious.
  • X, dear God, X!
• Viewers Are Morons:
  • Prevalent with troper-created puns, which will be pointed out with a Pun or Incredibly Lame Pun Sinkhole (the latter also being incorrect usage), no matter how obvious they are.
  • Examples on trope pages will often link to the very same page the examples are already on. Or, a perfectly fine example will have a second bullet point explaining everything that has already been explained a second time.
  • Tropes will be renamed and page images removed if so much as one person does not understand its relevance to the trope's description, sometimes with accusations of Fan Myopia thrown about no matter if that's actually the case.
  • The wiki has done this occasionally, such as when it changed some invokedUnfortunate Implications titles. Abuse Is Okay If It's Female On Male, for example, was changed because they were afraid people would take it literally (this change was enforced by Google, on threat of pulling all ad revenue), yet some I Thought It Meant titles, such as Men Are the Expendable Gender, are still in play.
• Visual Pun: Some of the images for our trope articles are this.
• The Voiceless: Troll Post.
• Waxing Lyrical: In addition to trope names, tropers will often disguise quotes from the song or show they're discussing as banter-like natter.
• We Will Use WikiWords in the Future: This very wiki is having this effect, with more readers and editors of the site casually referencing trope names InCamelCase, which in literary (pop culture) discussions are incredibly more recognized as TV Tropes terms. TV Tropes variations of trope names are also becoming more recognizable: After reading a lot of TV Tropes, what sounds more natural — the traditional literary term Bathos, or Narm?
• What Were You Thinking?: Some editors tend to use this at times as a reaction... and Pothole it to the What Were You Thinking? page.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Let's face it, not everything on this site really lends itself to a wiki format, but you have to give the admins credit for making it happen.
• Wiki Walk: It's a wiki, what else would you expect? Let's face it, you're probably in the middle of one right now. And that is why TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life. (Tabbed Browsing is the bane of everyone with ADHD.)
• Word, Schmord!:
  • Convection, Schmonvection
  • Strategy, Schmategy
  • Word Schmord
• Worldbuilding: This wiki has a couple of tips on how to help.
• You Keep Using That Word:
  • Egregious has been used so egregiously on this wiki that it has its own page.
  • Similarly Your Mileage Will Vary is used as a way of referring to Your Mileage May Vary taken up a notch on especially controversial issues that reach a point where there is no middle ground. Your Mileage May Vary comes from car commercials that say consumers might get a different amount of mileage than is advertised, and on this wiki, means that viewers might not agree with the statement. Using "Your Mileage Will vary" implies unanimous disagreement rather than inevitable controversy.
  • The word Trope does not come from TV Tropes, and like "subversion" its meaning in the real world is different than on this site. In reality, "trope" does not mean "storytelling device" but "the use of a word to have a meaning different than the usual one."