Unsettling Futures - The hollow philosophy of TV Tropes
When incompatible ways of thinking about science fiction writing collide
Ninety percent of everything is crud.
– Theodore Sturgeon
The knives are out in Turkey City
The Workshop Lexicon is a guide (of sorts) for down-and-dirty hairy-knuckled sci-fi writers, the kind of ambitious subliterate guttersnipes who actually write and sell professional genre material. It’s rough, rollicking, rule-of-thumb stuff suitable for shouting aloud while pounding the table.
– Bruce Sterling, Turkey City Lexicon, second introduction
The first time I encountered something like TV Tropes, it was the Turkey City Lexicon, a list of informal shorthand terms that evolved among multiple sci-fi writing workshops, including Turkey City in Austin, Texas, to quickly summarize issues around a critique table.*
You can easily see the embryonic form of some TV Tropes-ish critter gestating in its jokey, sharp definitions of common sci-fi story clichés. It contains several terms that would later be pillaged for the wiki itself, like "Call a Rabbit a Smeerp," "Kudzu plot," and "Said Bookism."
The lexicon was put together from terms drawn from many SFF pros over the years, passed down through various bull sessions and story critique groups. Many are attributed to specific writers, from Harlan Ellison to Damon Knight to Ursula K. LeGuin. Others were common parlance by the time the "official" list was assembled by Lewis Shiner and Bruce Sterling in 1988.
But it isn't a wiki, or a reference work, or a mere compilation of facts. Its subtitle is "A primer for SF workshops."
"Having an accurate and descriptive critical term for a common SF problem makes it easier to recognize and discuss," Shiner wrote for the first edition of the document.
Note that word, problem. Triple-underline it in your mind.
The Turkey City Lexicon is a document for writers, whether aspiring or working pros, to sharpen up their manuscript critiques, and thereby, hopefully, their stories. Not every term in the lexicon is one of derision, but most of them are, softened just a bit with humour, with the acknowledgement that these are common mistakes of the developing writer.
All-Devouring
TV Tropes' motto starts with a tinge of cosmic horror.
"The all-devouring pop culture wiki" is the masthead.
It's simultaneously a statement of intent, yet so over-the-top that it disarms anyone attempting to take it at face value.
But like all taxonomic systems, TV Tropes is meant to be comprehensive within its remit. And because the thing it's attempting to survey and catalogue and define is the entire world of fiction, and because its reach has become so vast, we have to take it seriously.
Which is why I'm going to get out my rhetorical baseball bat and take a few whacks at a fan wiki. Which is a strange thing to do, yes, but when a site has the cultural reach of TV Tropes, it can't just hide behind being a silly diversion. You don't get to be a powerful influence on SFF writing discourse for 18 years, and also be so inconsequential as to be beneath criticism.
So let's ask first: when TV Tropes ingests pop culture, movies, TV, science fiction novels, comics, how does it digest them? What does it make from what it devours?
The Philosophy of TV Tropes
When you are comprising a taxonomy, even a nerd-pop-culture taxonomy, you are constructing a lens through which to view the world. What is TV Tropes' lens?
These points, as far as I can work out, the core of the philosophy of TV Tropes:
1) All elements of stories are 'tropes'
2) Tropes are not good or bad, they are all neutral and have equal weight
3) There are no new ideas
Before I get down to explaining why I think this philosophy is a bunch of toxic horseshit, I'm going to have to support my thesis the site actually pushes these ideas, right? Let's take them one at a time.
1) All elements of stories are 'tropes'
This is the most self-evident. Trope used to refer more narrowly to a sort of literary convention, but TV Tropes has grossly expanded and run over that definition. Themes? Tropes. Stock characters and archetypes? Tropes. Tenses? Tropes. Significant pauses? Tropes. Animation techniques? Trooooooopes! The word is deployed as an amorphous, absorbing blob. Which is also, naturally, a trope.
This is supported by the site's own definition of "trope," which is "a pattern in storytelling, not only within the media works themselves, but also in related aspects such as the behind-the-scenes aspects of creation, the technical features of a medium, and the fan experience."
As long as it's happened three times, in any medium, anywhere, throughout recorded history, it counts as a trope.
All-devouring, no shit, eh?
There are multiple pages that attempt to enforce this idea, from the index of Omnipresent Tropes, to the site rule that No Trope Is Too Common to be catalogued (if you see a butterfly, pin it to the board, even if you see those fuckers everywhere) and most of all, in the page for The Tropeless Tale, which the site firmly believes does not exist.
2) Tropes are not good or bad, they are all neutral and have equal weight
They really drive this one home.
That's the "neutral" part of the equation. The bit about them having equal weight is less rigidly enforced by the site's rules, but is more a function of the structure of wikis. Pages have more or fewer examples, they have more or fewer links to and from them, but otherwise exist on a level playing field. Pride and Xanatos gambit? Same status. And guess which one has more examples?
"Every fictional work… is based on previous works. In fact, all works use 'elements' from previous works to make something new. That's basically why this entire website exists."
Although the site actively says this on the "so you want to be original" page, the idea is also a natural outgrowth of point one. If all stories are composed of tropes, then writing fiction is just a process of re-arranging tropes, and therefore devoid of true originality.
They do note that certain stories are so old they are de facto "original," so, I guess the storytellers who started talking about Gilgamesh and Enkidu can rest easy.
A philosophy no one actually believes…
I don't think that any individual or group sat down and formally decided on TV Tropes' philosophy. I think – and this is only a hypothesis – that it emerged organically, and that it has more to do with the rigours of running a very popular and editable website than with any of its creators' actual views on the nature of fiction.
TV Tropes emerged from folks who were having discussions about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, waaaaay back in the 1990s, and were using the comment threads of just about any article about any TV show on Salon.com to do so. They migrated to a site called Buffistas, and from there the discussions on "tropes" took on a life of its own, and sprouted into a website.
And then, "after we were featured on BoingBoing, we had to expand fast."
So you have a wildly popular site, with hundreds of thousands of new users, all with the power to edit, and no notability guidelines.
You can let them deign certain tropes to be cheap, hacky clichés and others clever devices appreciated by storytelling connoisseurs, or you can declare that all tropes are merely tools, that it's not about the trope, it's about how you use it, and thus tamp down the inevitable edit wars to a somewhat-reasonable level.
And from there, the philosophy organically emerges. All three points are less about a coherent view of fiction, and more about not having to deal with some angry asshole vandalizing your site with sockpuppet edits because he thinks that, actually, Beast Wars is the greatest TV show ever made.
But there are many, many people who have been influenced by the TV Tropes philosophy! And you can see what it has done to people's perceptions when you find out how TV Tropes tried to absorb the Turkey City Lexicon.
…except for an unlucky few
The TV Tropes entry for the Turkey City Lexicon starts with two lies.
The first is that the list is "a potential goldmine of tropes."
No. See above re: problems.
It then claims that it's a list of "concepts that professional writers frequently see in stories presented at the workshop," [emphasis mine] and firmly admonishes the reader that "both 'Tropes Are Not Bad' and 'Tropes Are Not Good' are in effect."
This defanging exercise is infuriating.
Some anonymous editor or editors saw the Turkey City Lexicon's introduction, cut that off and threw it in the trash, and then decided to add their own. The new intro undermines the point of the lexicon, and piously repeats the sterile philosophy of TV Tropes, just in case the reader didn't get it the first couple hundred times they've seen it.
Then they get to work on the lexicon's entries, which they have endeavoured to link to existing tropes (since nothing is new, etc.). Most of these work out pretty well, there are loads and loads of tropes. But a few lexicon entries are so specific and peculiar that attempts to fit them into the TV Tropes catalogue fail entirely. Others have suffered from links that are wildly reductive or just plain wrong – faced with a round peg and a square hole, editors have simply resorted to a larger hammer.
Consider the lexicon entry Squid in the Mouth:
"The failure of an author to realize that his/her own weird assumptions and personal in-jokes are simply not shared by the world-at-large. Instead of applauding the wit or insight of the author's remarks, the world-at-large will stare in vague shock and alarm at such a writer, as if he or she had a live squid in the mouth. Since SF writers as a breed are generally quite loony, and in fact make this a stock in trade, 'squid in the mouth' doubles as a term of grudging praise, describing the essential, irreducible, divinely unpredictable lunacy of the true SF writer. (Attr. James P. Blaylock)"
This entry has been linked to the Author Appeal trope, which is far broader and includes anything that any creator repeatedly features in their work, i.e. Quentin Tarantino and women's bare feet. It's a false correlation that completely fails to capture the spirit of Squid in the Mouth, which warns against/celebrates the nature of SF writers as deranged eccentrics.
And then there's the discussion on the Headscratchers tab of the page, where you see how much site users have actually internalized the TV Tropes ethos:
This whole thing strikes me as a fervent believer in the Sci Fi Ghetto throwing a bone to the genre. It's full of such vitriol against common sf ideas that one wonders if the author actually appreciates the genre at all.**
There's more like this, including defenders of the lexicon tying themselves into knots to not condemn any particular trope while suggesting that maybe some things actually are clichés?
TV Tropes has trained some people that not only should they consider all tropes equal and perfectly good and beyond criticism, but that anyone else trying to criticize a trope must be hammered down, too! How dare they attack the sacred trope!
A swing of the rhetorical baseball bat
Just because TV Tropes says that no trope is good or bad, or because it makes the implicit claim that all stories are just Tinker-Toyed together from a collection of tropes, that does not mean you have to believe it.
Why should you? It's just a silly wiki, right? A fun time-sink for a boring half hour or so?
But the idea of story-as-trope-assemblage has taken flight well beyond the boundaries of the site.
SFF writing Twitter is lousy with trope names (and AO3 tags, with which I have less familiarity) deployed as shorthand for story descriptions. Combine those with the frenzy for comps, and you have half the marketing for any given book.
"It's a Classy Cat Burglar and a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits trying to pull off One Last Job in a world that's Harry Potter meets Jurassic Park!"
Familiarity with trope names has made it possible for more people to have favourite tropes. Favourite tropes means it's possible for tropes to become marketing tools and components of pitches to agents, editors, and readers.
It's also meant that a significant amount of writing and publishing advice now involves tropes.
I've seen multiple SF agents and editors sincerely advising wannabe writers with some variation of "come up with a new spin on a familiar trope."
Frankly, I can't think of advice that's more… I don't know. Dispiriting? Infantilizing? Possibly good advice, from a publishing perspective? I mean, if it sells, why not…
But TV Tropes' philosophical underpinnings have been a splinter under my skin for a while now, and I want to offer a potential rebuttal to its central ideas.
Here we go:
1) All elements of stories are 'tropes'
I admit that this element could be the most straw-mannish way of phrasing my criticism, but I think it's still worth discussing.
Is there more to a story than just tropes, arranged with more or less skill? I think there is, or at the very least, there can be. Themes and subtext, subtle moments of characterization and description, and the specific interiority of characters may be crudely described by tropes, but can't be encompassed by them. The whole is more than the sum of its parts; the story is more than the tropes.
Unless the writing is really bad.
2) Tropes are not good or bad, they are all neutral and have equal weight
Horseshit.
Kudzu plots are bad, frontloading exposition is bad, sending a Stapledon onto the stage to just dryly lecture is bad. Saying "tropes are tools" is not a get out of jail free card.
Can you do something with hackneyed tropes? Can you subvert them, use them in satire and pastiche? Yes, but you have to start with the understanding that they are outmoded and lazy and worn thin. Only from that understanding can you build anything better.
Further, the flattening effect of TV Tropes, which drags themes like hubris and unrequited love down to the same level as, say, the unwanted harem plot contrivance, is just sad. Some elements are more important than others, and knowing which ones are which is a part of the process of learning to write.
3) There are no new ideas
The site says this a lot, in ways direct and subtle, and it can fuck right off with that nonsense.
Plenty of people believe this, sure. But if you are writing science fiction and fantasy specifically (and TV Tropes is heavily weighted in that direction) then subscribing to this belief is to start writing with one arm tied behind your back.
SFF is the storytelling space where you can explore literally any time, space, and idea imaginable. Even if originality is impossible, or just vanishingly rare you have to write as if it exists. Otherwise, why are you even trying?
Hot take: Quality is real!
The SFF discourse has been in the midst of a weird, largely undeclared war for the last couple of years, and the terms of the conflict are: are some things better than other things?
On the one side are the franchise fanboys who wanted Spider Man: No Way Home to win the Best Picture Oscar because it made the most money, the "Just let people enjoy things!" crowd who respond to any critique of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen with spittle-flinging rage, and people who resent being told that their comfort reads might be, well, bland and derivative.
On the other side are people who think that, subjective or not, quality is real, that fiction can and must be subjected to critical appraisal, that craft and art are things that can be debated, that popularity ≠ quality, and that being better is a laudable goal. (Also, guest appearances by Martin Scorsese.)
TV Tropes' own "Tropes are not good or bad!" mantra is not that conceptually distant from "Just let people enjoy things!" They both attempt to disarm the entire idea of criticism and quality, of even subjective quality. Discussions of trope-forward fiction often emphasize its "fun" status.
But it matters – to me, and I hope to others – to do more than write fun stories, to follow the well-trodden path, to find a new take on a familiar trope. I am trying (and mostly failing) to write well every time I sit down at the computer. I am hoping, every time I open a new book, to find something that will be more than the sum of its tropes.
And now, some positivity
If I was going to go full-grump here, I'd rant about how TV Tropes is killing writing and nobody does anything good anymore and sci-fi today just isn't as good as it was in the old days and blah blah blah.
The good news is that Sturgeon's Law is forever with us. I don't think TV Tropes is increasing the total amount of mediocre SFF writing; I think there's always good stuff (and we will always argue about which stuff that is).
Mostly, I think the influence of TV Tropes has been to affect what sort of mediocre writing is out there. I remember the late 1980s/early 1990s, when every third paperback in the bookstore promised some knockoff of Neuromancer. Bad writing follows trends, whether it's the cruddy space opera of the 1950s, or the grim, macho post-apocalypse tales that ripped off The Road Warrior, or the glut of samey-samey urban fantasy novels in the Aughts.***
Over the last decade, there's been a flood of competently written but not terribly exciting books that were clearly put together trope-first. Some of them will still break out, their creators finding the trope a springboard to making something genuinely thrilling. (See also: Michael Chabon's musings about a world in which all fiction was nurse romances.) Quality can come from unlikely sources.
I'm not here calling for anyone to tear down TV Tropes and salt the earth. I know that Me vs. TV Tropes is equivalent to Small Gnat vs. Mack truck doing 150 mph.
TV Tropes is fine, as a repository of nerd lore and trivia, and a trap for unwary and bored internet browsers. But I hope I can remind a few people that it has no authority, that its laws and philosophy are peculiar only to itself – they have no relevance once you click away, or close the window.
Self-Promotion Corner
Nothing much going on right now, unfortunately. Flogging stories, writing stuff, but the only thing ticking along is Broken Road, the adaptation of my Asimov's/Year's Best story Patience Lake.
In the unlikely event that anyone wants me to write something for money, I am available for comically small amounts and can be reached at ouranosaurus [at] gmail [dot] com. If you want to use that address to tell me I'm an idiot and an asshole, you should know that I've been a print reporter for almost twenty-five years now. I'm well aware of my unfortunate idiot/asshole status. There have been letters.
Remember, never like or subscribe! Peter Q. of Kapuskasing, Ont., liked AND subscribed to Unsettling Futures, and the next day his dog peed in his shoes, his wife left him, and his thumbs fell off. Don't let that happen to you!
Footnotes
*An abbreviated version of the lexicon is in the back of Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology, which I wrote about recently. It's real good!
**I felt a kind of raw existential dread when I saw someone "defending" science fiction from the likes of Ursula LeGuin, Connie Willis, Bruce Sterling, Howard Waldrop, etc. Jesus wept…
***See also, my previous rant, here.