So I’ve talked about Does The Dog Die? as a viewing tool. (It’s a site that lists content warnings for TV shows and movies, in case you missed that blog post.) There are other sites sort of like it, too—wikis, obviously, in a far more in-depth manner.
Quick explanation: wikis are just like wikipedia, but sometimes fan-run and usually geared toward a specific topic, like a TV show, comic book series, or video game. So each character, plot arc, etc would have their own page.
But let’s talk about the holy grail. Let’s talk about the biggest procrastination tool ever—while remaining under the guise of researching tropes and ideas, of course!—and a rabbit hole many have fallen into.
TVTropes is a website that is only partially true to its name anymore. It lists tropes, their explanations, and many examples. (Trope: “The word trope has also come to be used for describing commonly recurring literary and rhetorical devices, motifs or cliches in creative works.”.)
But it has expanded far beyond the realm of TV. It reaches into comics and their sprawling worlds, video games, movies, books, fan projects, webcomics, music, and even into real life. Many, many things are on TVTropes, most of them created and curated by fans.
I myself have been lucky enough to get a project up onto TVTropes, and as a creator, the high cannot be comprehended. It’s like getting a book report combined with a wiki combined with character/plot analysis by readers.
As said above, you can search by trope or by series (/movie/book/person/etc). Definition and/or brief plot description, plus a picture for flavor.
Then, the list.
This is where the time sink comes in.
You can spend hours trawling through related pages. It’s like surfing wikipedia, but somehow worse, because you can skip directly to every single one of your interests. You can use it to search for recommendations, things containing tropes you like, or you can read through what the series you adore contains.
Some of it is YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary), which means it’s up to some amount of interpretation. Some of it is spoilers, though it has its own spoiler tagging system—the white blocks that if you click on, reveal the text. Click at your peril. You could learn anything you want on that godforsaken website. I’ve used it for series I love, looking for spoilers from obscure webcomics, and gleefully fawned over my own story’s entry.
So while it is an amazing procrastination tool and a very fun way to waste some hours as a reader or ingester of media… It can. Technically. Be a tool for writers.
Hear me out! Yes, it is a dangerous path to tread, not to be undertaken lightly, or with a deadline.
But all stories, no matter the medium, are full of tropes. Tropes are not bad! Yes, cliches happen, but so do deconstructions, reconstructions, lampshades, averted examples, and straight plays. The Chosen One is a trope. The aged mentor is a trope. YA and swords and sorcery and dystopia all have tropes. Horror tropes are so ubiquitous there is an entire sub-genre of movies riffing them.
You could go trawling for ideas. There are character tropes and plot tropes and plot twist tropes and so many more. It is a giant list of inspiration, ready to be sifted through, ready to strike you.
If you are capable of tackling such a behemoth of a site. Like I said, be warned, be wary, and be careful. But have fun with it.
